LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 


























































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































Class Z- 3 _ 

Book_ -H. - \ S - \ 

Copyright N°_ 


COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT, 














BETHESDA 


The Temperate Life 
























His arms were stretched out, as in a call for attention 

(See page 1+7.) 











BETHESDA 

A 

The Temperate Life 



■> > 
> > > 


NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD COMPANY 

1923 



















Copyright 1923 
By 

Moffat, Yard & Company 







Printed by 
The Barnes Printing 
229 W. 28th St., N 


Co., Inc., 
ew York 


SEP 2 8 *23 

©Ci A 760081 
'V-e | 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


BOOK I —PEACE ON EARTH 

PAGE 

Chapter I—Vision. 11 

Chapter II—Fanaticism . 23 

Chapter III—Melodies. 40 

Chapter IV—Repose . 52 

Chapter V—Bethesda. 71 

Chapter VI—The Temperate Life. 89 

BOOK II — THE TROUBLING 

Chapter VII—Riot . Ill 

Chapter VIII—Discipline . 129 

Chapter IX—Heroism . 147 

Chapter X—Recovery . 166 

Chapter XI—Despair . 187 

Chapter XII—Separation . 206 

BOOK III —THE CURE 

Chapter XIII—The Issue . 225 

Chapter XIV—Remedy . 241 

Chapter XV—Futurity . 281 



















ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 

His arms were stretched out, as in a call 

FOR ATTENTION.FRONTIS 

She POINTED ITS HEAD TOWARD THE SEA. ... 19 

It WAS TOO LATE TO SAVE THE HERO OF THE 

HOUR. 165 

“William Calhoun, stop!”. 277 











BOOK I 


PEACE ON EARTH 



CHAPTER I 


VISION 

It was a gala day in Venice. For a few 
hours, the impetus of twentieth-century 
life had been withdrawn from the “Jewel 
of the Adriatic.” Modernity had stepped 
aside for the nonce. The throb of engine 
and the hum of motor had ceased; an 
unusual aspect of virile peace and reposeful 
gaiety lay on palaces, canals and lagoon; 
the spirit of the Doges and the shade of 
“The Merchant” were apparently abroad, 
and it seemed as though the accumulated 
appeals of the centuries gone by to human 
love of restful mirth and quiet enjoyment 
had taken possession of the acts and 
thoughts of men. 

The last rays of the brilliant July sun, 
sinking to rest behind the Apennines, 
were still gilding the domes of San Marco, 

ii 



12 Betliesda 


and kissing the angelic tip of the Cam¬ 
panile. Bright evening colorings were 
gathering on the horizon, and preparing 
to invest the city. The night was to 
be brilliant also, as the gentle sway of 
Luna was soon to replace for a time old Sol’s 
suspended regime. The scenes and sounds 
of the day and night were and were to be 
familiar, yet unique; for there was in prog¬ 
ress a brief, dignified carnival of song and 
good cheer, in memory, and at least partial 
reproduction, of the fifteenth-century ele¬ 
gance of the Venetian State. 

From the steps of the Academia , a young 
man, dressed in a dark gray traveling suit, 
stepped into a gondola, and started along 
the Grand Canal toward the Lagoon. He 
was his own gondolier. His movements, as 
he propelled the boat, were leisurely and 
graceful; and his tall, lithe figure swayed 
rhythmically with its motion. To even a 
casual observer, the handsome face of this 
youth of 19 or 20 would readily have told 
of great strength of will and of steadfast, 
lofty purposes in life. And yet it would 
also have hinted at something, somewhere 






Bethesda 


13 


and somehow, going wrong with that other¬ 
wise noble life—if not of hopeless dissi¬ 
pation, at least of lamentable and frequent 
lapses of some kind from the path of recti¬ 
tude which any one would say should 
normally have been his. 

Traces of furrows were already begin¬ 
ning to appear in the broad, noble forehead, 
which was the most prominent feature of 
a head indicative of native mental force 
and superiority. The clear gray eyes had 
lost none of their boyish lustre; and they 
manifestly looked forth from a soul of 
inborn nobility. Obviously, however, some 
of its pristine firmness had departed from 
the mouth; and the clean-shaven cheeks 
were more sallow and less rotund than 
would have been expected in a youth so 
vigorous. One who looked at that face 
and that figure would bestow a second 
glance, with less approbation, if not with 
more sadness, than that which marked the 
first. The man was evidently an American, 
well born and well-to-do. 

He guided the gondola carefully among 
the other craft, which were unusually 




14 


Bethesda 


numerous for so early in the evening. 
Along past the beautiful residences, palaces 
and churches, from most of whose windows 
electric lights were already casting their 
beams athwart the water, under the bridge 
of the Rialto where less speed and special 
care were demanded, he proceeded until he 
was at the mouth of the Canal, opposite the 
Church of St. Maria De Salute, when he 
turned abruptly to the left and crossed over 
to the landing of the Hotel Albergo Dell 9 
Europa. In a few more moments, he had 
knocked vigorously at a door to a suite of 
rooms on the third floor of that popular 
hostelry. The door was opened by a middle- 
aged man, who immediately announced to 
the other occupant of the reception room, 
“Mr. Calhoun.” “Hello Bill,” came a deep, 
cheery voice from the window seat at the 
farther side of the room; “you are just in 
time. Come in and try one of Phil’s good 
weeds with us.” 

The two men, who thus received the 
visitor, were also Americans. In their 
summer tour, they had come to the 
“Europa” a few hours before, and were 




Bethesda 


15 


awaiting Calhoun in keeping an appoint¬ 
ment made when the latter had sailed from 
New York in the preceding April. The 
three friends thus met to complete their 
travels together until late in the fall. The 
oldest one, he who had admitted the third 
member of the party, was Dr. Philip Ross, 
a bachelor and prosperous physician from 
New York. His twenty odd years of active 
professional life, since he was graduated 
from Princeton, had dealt leniently with 
him; and his pleasing, though somewhat 
homely, ruddy countenance, bedecked with 
iron-gray hair and mustache, was always 
ready to become smiling with good nature 
and general contentment. John B. Crosby, 
the remaining member of the now united 
trio had still a year ahead of him, to com¬ 
plete his course in the same university 
from which Ross had come. He was mak¬ 
ing his own way in the world; and his 
friends seemed not far wrong in their belief 
that he was destined to rise in the legal 
profession far too high to be always 
retained in the small western community 
from which he came. Dark brown, almost 





16 Bethesda 


black hair displayed a tendency to curl 
about his ears and temples. A bright, clear, 
frank smile illumined his rather swarthy 
face, as he arose to his full height of little 
more than five and a half feet and extended 
his hand in greeting to his slightly younger 
friend Calhoun. “After you have lighted 
up,” said he, “come to this spacious window 
seat with Phil and me, and see the visions 
and listen to the melodies; for it is already 
apparent that very much of pleasurable 
interest is to be going on out there this 
evening”;—and he waved an arm grace¬ 
fully toward the Lagoon. 

“I had a ‘vision’ a few hours ago,” said 
Calhoun. 

“Oh! Billy,” exclaimed Ross, “it is per¬ 
haps well that Jack and I have arrived to 
look after your young self and to act in 
some respects, we hope with your cordial 
approval, as your guardian, if not your 
mentor, during the residue of the tour. 
Perhaps we ought not to have permitted 
you to be over here alone during these last 
two months. But tell us about this ‘vision.’ 
Was it a movie, or a dream, or a reality?” 





Bethesda 


17 


“Your reference to a guardian, or mentor, 
or ‘big brother,’ or something of the kind 
goes deeper than you fellows could 
imagine,” replied Calhoun. “Let me first 
speak—reverently—of what I saw, or 
imagined, or dreamed of; and then have 
patience with me while I dare to reveal 
some of the facts of my inmost being—a 
condition which I am coming to fear may 
be serious, if not desperate.” 

He stepped to a table in the center of the 
room, on which were some bottles and 
decanters containing several kinds of fine 
wines and liquors, poured out a generous 
glass of “Scotch” and drank it rapidly and 
with an apparent relish, which caused his 
companions to exchange quick, inquiring 
and rather surprised glances; and then, re¬ 
turning and seating himself comfortably by 
the window with them, he began. 

“Let me first relate the little I hope I 
really know of the ‘vision,’ and then I will 
tell you of my folly and peril—a chapter 
which will startle you and which I would 
give a thousand worthless lives like mine, if 
possible, to expunge.” 




18 


Bethesda 


“About three o’clock this afternoon, I was 
seated alone at an outside table at Florian’s, 
mildly enjoying the views of the ‘world’ af¬ 
forded by the passing throngs on the Piazza. 
A glass of untasted Lacrimae Christi was in 
front of me, and the residue of the quart 
was in ice by my feet. Happening to throw 
my head slightly back and glance upward, I 
noticed a pure white pigeon, flying from the 
direction of the Palace of the Doges and 
gradually descending to the promenade in 
front of me. It was so spotless that 
in the bright sunlight it seemed as if it 
were made of alabaster. It circled and 
glided with the airy lightness of down, and 
seemed to be searching for a place to rest as 
immaculate as itself. My attention was nec¬ 
essarily riveted on its beautiful movements, 
and I had really no choice but to note the 
place where it would alight. It soared 
around and around over the heads of the 
crowds, unusually large, gathered there 
from every quarter of the globe, and finally 
settled down, as lightly as with the touch of 
a passing breath, on the left shoulder of a 
girl, who stood near the base of the Cam- 





She pointed its head toward the sea 








Bethesda 


19 


panile, breaking up little pieces of bread and 
throwing the crumbs to the hundreds of 
other pigeons clustered close about her. 
They would flutter and hop, or fly away 
from the other pedestrians; but they 
thronged around her as confidently as 
though she were a favorite one of them. She 
was dressed entirely in white, as pure and 
brilliant as that of the friendly visitor upon 
her shoulder. As I looked, my imagination 
flew eastward over the Adriatic, and away 
to the region ‘Beyond Jordan,’ and nineteen 
centuries backward in time, and saw the 
Spirit like a dove descend, in advance of the 
‘Voice’ that said, ‘This is my Beloved Son, 
hear ye Him.’ ” 

“The girl, who appeared to be seventeen 
or eighteen years of age, with a slight smile 
which will live with me through eternity, 
reached up and gently took the bird from 
her shoulder and, holding it close to her 
breast, smoothed its glossy plumage with 
her left hand. It seemed to cling to her con¬ 
fidingly and lovingly. After caressing it 
thus for a moment, she held it a slight dis¬ 
tance from her and pointed its head toward 




20 


Bethesda 


the sea. Then it flew from her, slowly and 
apparently with regret but straight as an 
arrow, in the direction she had indicated, till 
it was lost to my view beyond the building 
near which I sat. Thus ends that portion 
of my story; for if you were to ask me to de¬ 
scribe that ‘Divinity’ in white, who com¬ 
muned so naturally with God’s own crea¬ 
tures, I should have to say that that is far 
beyond the remotest possibility of my gross 
and largely besotted powers.” 

“Don’t try,” said Crosby, with a pleasing 
smile, yet not without an appearance of rail¬ 
lery. “She was a simple little being, hardly 
yet developed beyond the status of birds and 
animals. If she had been fuller blown, she 
would have been more woman and less pig¬ 
eon. Her sphere of existence is with Haw¬ 
thorne’s fawn, Donatello, who did not have 
sense enough not to commit murder. Don’t 
you agree with me, Doc?” 

“No! No! No!” exclaimed Ross. “ You are 
traveling diametrically in the wrong direc¬ 
tion. If she has the characteristics which 
the actions of herself and the pigeons seem 
to reveal, she belongs to the higher and 




Bethesda 


21 


stronger portion of our race, and in her ma¬ 
turity her word or gesture may dominate, 
not men alone, but mankind in general.” 

He paused. His companions looked, rath¬ 
er than spoke, their desire for a further ex¬ 
planation; and Calhoun went over and 
drank another glass of “Scotch.” He had 
offered the liquor also to the others; but 
both looked at him with apprehension, and 
Crosby said: “Well, go on Phil and explain 
yourself a little further.” 

“Joan of Arc was at one time like that,” 
continued Ross; “so was Florence Nightin¬ 
gale ; and so were Moses, and Demosthenes, 
and Washington. I may be sadly wrong, of 
course, like most thinkers who are real phil¬ 
osophers; but I believe that our tiny life 
here is merely a frail, temporary bridge be¬ 
tween two infinities, and that the best such 
little pons or causeway is that which is 
most uniformly on a level with the correct 
position of those endless planes. Only the 
saint, about to pass on and join the silent 
majority and never report back to us, has 
here a slight, temporary glimpse of the per¬ 
fections of that span. But who can tell or 
guess what revelations, if we would only 




22 


Bethesda 


seek for them aright, might come to us from 
such beautiful, unsullied creatures as must 
have been she whom Bill has described, and 
who are at or near the other end of one of 
those comparatively perfect little expanses. 
I am afraid that our spiritualists and clair¬ 
voyants are working in the wrong direction, 
or knocking at the wrong door. It may be, 
and I dare to think it is possible, that the 
key to our knowledge here of the eternity 
whither we are going may ultimately be 
found as the result of diligent investigation 
of the eternity whence we came. Methink, 
Billy, that your ‘Vision/ when you meet her, 
will afford a fruitful field for such an inquiry. 
She followed the pigeon, of course, and you 
followed her; and you know, at least in a 
general way, how to begin or continue the 
quest.” 

“Yes, she followed the pigeon,” answered 
Calhoun, “and disappeared from my view in 
the same general way as did it. But alas, 
alas, fellows, the fact that I did not follow 
her is connected with the sad part of my 
story, which I will try to relate. If I weary 
you, offer me a drink, good and strong and 
cheery, and I will stop.” 




CHAPTER II 


FANATICISM 

For a few seconds the speaker gazed out 
of the window at the scenes on the Canal 
and Lagoon, which were momentarily be¬ 
coming more brilliant; and then he con¬ 
tinued. 

“She walked a few steps, through the 
flocks of pigeons on the pavement, to the 
side of a gray-haired gentleman of distin¬ 
guished bearing, probably her father, who 
stood looking down upon her with a benig¬ 
nant smile on his face, and took his arm; 
and they sauntered leisurely away as I have 
said. And I did not follow them because 1 
had to sit still and commune with my wine'' 

“Now, you fellows may look at each other 
and become serious and wonder, if you 
please, when I use that word ‘commune.’ 
But it was a real communion, as it has come 


23 



24 


Bethesda 


to be so often with me. No other word 
would aptly describe the experience. I know 
the wisdom of the ages declares 'Wine is a 
mocker, strong drink is raging.’ The de¬ 
scription of alcohol as a 'demon/ wrung 
from the hearts of countless widows, or¬ 
phans and inebriates, and blazoned from 
myriads of pulpits and rostra will echo in 
the future even long after our day and gen¬ 
eration. Yet I have dared to believe that 
the time will come, for uplifted and advanc¬ 
ing humanity, when men will know chiefly 
as a benign influence that potion, that 'bev¬ 
erage’ if you prefer to call it by that name, 
which God put or allowed to come into the 
world for its ultimate good. The curse, the 
diabolical infamy of it is simply an expres¬ 
sion of our innate sinfulness, which we 
apologetically describe as a lack of self con¬ 
trol. In some age of our race, that control 
will belong to our manhood as naturally 
as does the tendency to cry belong to a new¬ 
ly bom babe. The victims today of excess 
in the use of alcohol are like the hideous 
white spots on the otherwise healthy bodies 
of those unfortunate creatures who, so nu- 




Bethesda 


25 


merous in Bible times and now so compara¬ 
tively few, have hidden their faces from 
their fellow beings and cried ‘unclean, un¬ 
clean.’ They will become less numerous and 
awful as humanity progresses; and perhaps 
some social convulsion, some cataclysm of 
nations, races or peoples may hasten the 
process. But Oh! how numerous the spots, 
the derelicts, the victims, the bits of refuse 
are now all over the world. And, strange, 
accursed and hideously paradoxical as it 
has sometimes seemed to me, I am con¬ 
vinced that, through a process pleasant and 
usually very gratifying, I, normally and by 
arduous training a strong-willed man, am 
destined to become one of them—one of the 
useless bits of wreckage, a speck, alas, in the 
flotsam and jetsam on the far-flung shore of 
inebriety.” 

“I have said the process is pleasant and 
ordinarily very gratifying. That is why I 
used the word ‘commune.’ There comes 
over me, and gradually takes possession and 
practically assumes control of me, an urge, 
an impetus, a something which the word de¬ 
sire is altogether too small to describe, 




26 


Bethesda 


pleasant, even delightful as a rule, which 
calls for alcohol in some tasteful form, as a 
solace shall I say? Nay more—as a friend, 
a companion, a satisfying something with 
which I am on familiar terms of association 
and with which in a very real sense I com¬ 
mune. And I have to do so. Or, at any rate, 
I prefer so strongly to do so that it becomes 
essentially a necessity.” 

“I am persuaded that I have thus describ¬ 
ed, very inadequately, something which is 
unique and sui generis. Nothing but alcohol 
does, or can do, that sort of thing. You can 
not companion with heroin, or agallochum, 
or any kind of narcotic or incense. By eat¬ 
ing or drinking anything in much excess, 
you may entail the awful agonies that her¬ 
ald the end of the glutton. Kipling uses no 
undue coloring in his word picture of the 
gehenna, that begins here and goes on eter¬ 
nally as the result of an unholy ‘love-o- 
women.’ But no communion, no real com¬ 
radeship is even suggested to such devotees 
and victims. It is only alcohol, King Alcohol 
if you please, that finds me tired, perhaps 
feeble, and sits down by my side and makes 




Bethesda 


27 


me strong; that comes to me failing, dis¬ 
couraged, or forlorn, and renews my forti¬ 
tude and ability; that observes my feet slip¬ 
ping from the solid rock, and lifts me up 
out of the miry clay; that always puts into 
me, however glad or sorry, buoyant or de¬ 
pressed I may be, new hope, loftier ideals 
and enlarged courage, stamina and vision.” 

“Must such experiences lead ultimately to 
disaster and hopeless ruin ? Is it inevitable 
that such communion shall at last become 
the hissing of serpents, the howling of dem¬ 
ons and the gloatings of the slimy denizens 
of hell? I believe no—not always and for¬ 
ever. But for men and women as they now 
are, for me—0! God, I know it is for me— 
yes. And now let me tell you why, for me.” 

“Don't be a pessimist Bill,” exclaimed 
Crosby. “You had no such tendency while 
you and I were so intimate, from our boy¬ 
hood down to the time, three years ago, 
when I went away to college. Go on, old 
Pal; but be sure to tell us the bright side of 
the story. You will come out all right, I am 
sure.” 

“Thank you,” answered Calhoun. “We 






28 


Bethesda 


may possibly hope that you are right. But 
listen. Four and a half years ago, in Janu¬ 
ary, 1910, I went, with my father, mother 
and sister, to live in that little city of New 
Jersey where he, after his business interests 
had been transferred from the West to 
Philadelphia, decided to locate his very 
beautiful but rather distant suburban home. 
That, Jack, goes a little further back than 
the time which you have mentioned as the 
date of our separation—back to my leaving 
the town of Inwood where we grew up as 
chums. Entering the high school in my new 
home city, I found myself, in a few months, 
a welcome and rather active member of a 
group of about fifteen young men, some in 
the school and others already embarked in 
the small business life of the place, who call¬ 
ed their little social organization The Jolly 
Frolics/ The youthful society had been 
formed, sometime before my arrival, for in¬ 
nocent amusement in a somewhat staid and 
old-fashioned community. But by the time 
I became a member, it had come largely to 
devote its attention to an apparently more 
attractive enterprise, and certainly a more 






Bethesda 


29 


subtle and dangerous one—an endeavor to 
aid many of the older men of the town in 
their efforts to stem the tide of total prohibi¬ 
tion of the importation, sale, transfer, use, 
or handling in any manner whatever of any 
intoxicating liquor within that community. 
We boys, siding with our elders in deeming 
ourselves deprived of our natural, inalien¬ 
able personal liberties by the attempted en¬ 
forcement of any such a law or ordinance, 
united whole-heartedly with them in the de¬ 
termination and endeavor to maintain what 
we insistently called our rights; and the ex¬ 
tremes to which we went may be described 
best, perhaps, as an attempted antidote to 
fanaticism.” 

“For several years in that somewhat rural 
city of about twelve thousand inhabitants, 
the ‘dry forces,’ so-called, comprising many 
of the social, moral, religious and erratic 
leaders, had been fighting to down the 
‘Hydra-headed demon,’ to clean up the town 
as they expressed it, and ‘to remove tempta¬ 
tion from the young and rising generations 
in our beautiful City of Homes.’ The Rev. 
Dr. Matthews, pastor of the First Methodist 





30 


Bethesda 


Church, which was our largest and most 
popular place of worship, was preaching 
monthly sermons on the evils of intemper¬ 
ance and demanding that wines and liquors 
disappear forever from our borders. Good 
old motherly ladies, such as Aunt Mary Tre- 
mont and Mother McPherson, as they were 
affectionately called, (the latter being the 
wife of Andrew McPherson, Mayor of the 
City) led the large militant forces of the 
W. C. T. U. in condemning everything that 
could smell of alcohol, and insisting on its 
absolute exclusion. Representatives of the 
Anti-Saloon League harangued us from pul¬ 
pits, school-house platforms, and even cart 
tails. The Salvation Army frequently mon¬ 
opolized our brilliantly lighted street cor¬ 
ners, in its effort to help on The cause’; and 
its gayly bedecked lassies beat their tam¬ 
bourines to the time of ‘Make ’er dry,’ 
‘Make ’er dry/ ‘Make ’er dry.’ ” 

“And so,” laughed Doctor Ross, “it be¬ 
came a Sahara.” 

“You bet/ answered the narrator. “And 
the remains of old John Barleycorn seemed 
to be buried so deep in its sands by that si- 




Bethesda 


31 


moom of fanaticism, that they thought no 
caravan for the next ten thousand years 
would ever discover a bone.” 

“The motives of those good—and bad— 
people, including generally the professional 
politicians who jumped in and helped when 
it became evident how the local elections 
would go, were essentially all right; but 
many of their methods were wrong, almost 
to the verge of criminality; and the results 
were lamentably fatal.” 

“How could it be otherwise,” added the 
Doctor, “in so small a community, into 
which the forbidden beverage could be so 
easily brought from comparatively very 
short distances. It needs a world, or at least 
a nation, to do a thing like that with any 
chance of success. The scores of towns, 
cities, counties and even states over there in 
our home-land, which have tried similar 
stunts, could record sad, sad stories of the 
hundreds of thousands of homes and prom¬ 
ising young lives that have been shattered 
and wrecked by their folly. God grant that 
the time may come, even within the short 
span of our own lives, when we shall be able 





32 


Bethesda 


to do what they essayed, on a large enough 
scale, on a country-wide basis perhaps, to 
make it a real and lasting success—to see 
it grow into one of the greatest blessings 
that could possibly come to a people. But I 
fear that we have no cause to hope for such 
an outcome for many generations yet to 
come.” 

“I trust that your hopes and prayers may 
be answered and realized, Doc,” responded 
Calhoun. “The moral fibre of the race may 
rise sometime, somewhere, to the requisite 
height. But I opine it is impossible now. 
I know it is impossible in a small community . 
In my humble opinion, it would require some 
Divine dispensation , the stirring of some 
force mightier than ourselves, to make it 
practically operative anywhere.” 

“Well! the ‘bone dry law’ was over our 
homes and our lives; and we of the Jolly Frol¬ 
ics fought, with many older comrades, for 
what we conceived to be our rights and our 
American liberties. We would have wines , 
liquors and alcohol in any form we chose , 
and we had them . Stagecoaches from near¬ 
by places and trains from Philadelphia, 




Bethesda 


33 


New York, Newark or Trenton brought us 
packages of ‘nails,’ ‘cement,’ ‘tools’ and 
what not; and off in some secluded nook, 
some ‘hole in the woods,’ the refreshing bev¬ 
erages flowered from those packages, and 
made some of us beastly drunk. When the 
authorities began to think they sniffed al¬ 
cohol about our importations, the older men, 
who were indulging in the same practices as 
ourselves but probably with more caution 
and less excesses, helped us to obtain the 
‘goods’ in subtle and multitudinous ways. 
And we boys, like hundreds of others, many 
older and some even younger, boys most of 
whom had been brought up to know the 
taste of alcohol and to appreciate its dan¬ 
gerous enticement, and who, had we been 
left free to drink occasionally at our par¬ 
ents’ tables or in other environments that 
would have militated against excess, would 
probably never have been anything but tem¬ 
perate, thus started rapidly down the road 
to hopeless inebriety and dissipation. The 
little cemetery on the hill, a dozen blocks 
from my home, already has a score or more 
of graves which otherwise would probably 




34 


Bethesda 


not be there; and three of them contain the 
almost dehumanized bodies of members of 
the Jolly Frolics. Andy Smythe, one of the 
brightest of our little band of fifteen, took 
with him there the broken hearts of such a 
father and mother as God rarely unites to 
love so lovable a child; and Mark Brady and 
Ben Somerville, the other two, went there 
amid the sorrows of most of the community, 
who mourned as those who have no hope. 
There are poor widows and destitute or¬ 
phans among us now, who owe their weeds 
and their desperate unsupported life strug¬ 
gles of the future to our damnable ‘dry law/ 
But worst of all methinks there are among 
us hundreds of superb men, and possibly al¬ 
so a few women, who must , or at any rate 
will , continue in the use of alcohol, more and 
more, until, if not saved by a miracle, until 
—until fiends gloat over their gluttonous 
animalism and finally hurl them into hottest 
hades; while thousands of other lives, pros¬ 
perous and happy but for our bone-dry law, 
are made sad and contorted and ruined by 
their fall. How many such places, cursed 
and blighted irretrievably by the fanaticism 




Bethesda 


35 


of good intentions, there are over there in 
that broad, fair land of the free! And I am 
one of the dupes and victims .” 

He ceased speaking, and gazed abstract¬ 
edly for a minute or two out of the window, 
toward the festive scenes on the waters be¬ 
low. His companions were convinced, how¬ 
ever, that he was merely staring, without 
really noticing anything that was transpir¬ 
ing outside or hearing aught of the soft, 
sweet strains of music that were now filling 
the cool, balmy air from the sea; and they 
instinctively remained silent, evidently ex¬ 
pecting the conclusion of his story. 

Soon he pulled himself together again, as 
it were, and turning to them with a sad 
smile continued:— 

“As for myself, I may say, without ego¬ 
tism or any particular satisfaction, that my 
position in life and rather strong will power 
kept me from yielding to excess as rapidly 
or as completely as did most of my com¬ 
panions. I was not born nor bred to be a 
weakling or a degenerate. I joined in the 
Bacchanalian revels of the Jolly Frolics, 
and helped to seek out and guard the most se- 




36 


Bethesda 


eluded nooks and corners and leafy bowers, 
where unmolested we could drink and sleep, 
and generally did my part with ‘the boys’ to 
preserve and enforce our ‘liberties’ and in¬ 
dulge our appetites. But always, while 
some of my chums dissipated in many ways, 
I rigidly restricted my lapses to drinking 
within our ‘dry territory,’ and enjoying 
there with the other boys, and some mature 
men, the pleasures of forbidden fruit. And, 
as a rule, when away from our trysting 
places, I walked erect and gave to my good 
friends very little evidence of my dissipa¬ 
tion. My confidence in myself—in my com¬ 
plete self control—was firm and absolute; 
and I was sure that I could easily withdraw 
from the Jolly Frolics, and terminate the 
wild part of my career, at any time. My 
splendid, indulgent and somewhat short¬ 
sighted father and my saintly mother—Oh! 
who could begin to measure her confiding 
love for her only son—my beautiful, proud 
sister and a few of my other relatives and 
friends undoubtedly noticed unfavorable 
changes in me and were solicitous about 
them. But I retained their confidence and 




Bethesda 


37 


esteem, and succeeded marvelously in con- 
cealing the evil that was growing upon me. 
Why, I would sing in the choir of the Pres¬ 
byterian Church nearly every Sunday 
morning—and my rather good tenor was 
always well appreciated—and in the after¬ 
noon or evening I would take my part hi¬ 
lariously in a carefully secluded carnival of 
drunkenness and song; and frequently I 
would see some confiding fair one home from 
the theatre or a social gathering, and then 
slip away to our secret rendezvous and sat¬ 
isfy the craving, nay the command, which 
was gaining in strength within me.” 

“That craving, that mandate to go on to 
madness as the dry ‘bunch’ in our town 
would call it, has grown apace. It has never 
been disagreeable, or apparently hideous; it 
is usually delightful. And with the feeling 
definitely within me always—though grad¬ 
ually growing less I admit—that I am still 
in a large degree master of the situation, I 
put forward myself as it were, and take the 
beverage, when the call, the urge is upon 
me, take it as a blessed boon, a solace, a com¬ 
panion, with whom I have most pleasurable 




38 


Bethesda 


associations, with whom in a very real sense 
I seem at least to commune.” 

“If at last ‘it biteth like a serpent and 
stingeth like an adder/ I have only to say I 
have never yet thoroughly felt the sting or 
the bite. The strength of my physical con¬ 
stitution and the natural pugnacity, if not 
the carefully cultivated will power, of my 
mental make-up have saved me thus far 
from the terrors of the drunkard. Yet I 
can not avoid the conviction that they are 
there—in the more or less distant future— 
for me. The shadow has sometimes seemed 
to cross my path; the echo of a fiendish 
laugh, or howl, has occasionally appeared to 
disturb my unnatural dreams. It was the 
fear that such evanescent unrealities might 
soon advance and multiply and become a 
real menace or horror, that caused me to ar- 
range this tour with you, my good friends, 
this tour—away from living eyes and ears, 
which might, I had begun to apprehend, 
soon hear or see too much. My pleasant 
journeys on this side of the water may be 
mercifully postponing the evil day; for as 
yet the joy, the delights of alcohol and the 




Bethescla 


39 


soul-satisfying communion with it are still 
mine. That is why, with the craving upon 
me, I sat still and let the beatific vision pass 
away from my ken this afternoon, while I 
sipped my wine. But it will not, it cannot, 
be always thus. At the end—but enough. 
Now I must have another drink/’ 




CHAPTER III 


MELODIES 

Half an hour later, the three friends were 
seated in a commodious gondola, moving 
slowly, scarcely more than drifting, out¬ 
ward into the lagoon. They were gliding 
through a place of beauty and melody. The 
light, cool breeze from the east was rippling 
the water into wavelets, the crests of which 
were reflecting in rainbow hues the myriad 
lights on the shores and on many other gon¬ 
dolas. The rays of the nearly full moon, 
just rising over there behind the Illyrian 
hills, were rapidly extending a silver sheen 
across the surface of the sea, and appeared 
to be endeavoring to restore the supremacy 
in sky and water of the Italian “blue,” which 
had been contending with the encroaching 
darkness of the night. From the ends of 
most of the gondolas, streamers of silk or 


40 



Bethesda 


41 


bunting hung gracefully over little masts in 
the middle, ten or twelve feet high; and 
festooned on these many parti-colored lights 
enhanced the splendor of the scene. The 
City and its visitors had filled these boats, 
thus gayly illuminated, with the best musi¬ 
cal talents, though most of them were na¬ 
tive. They were singing—singing the popu¬ 
lar ballads of the day and the sweet home 
songs of the race, as only Northern Italy 
can sing them. Over the exquisite expanse 
floated occasionally notes from the lips of a 
Madame Patti or an Enrico Caruso, “inglor¬ 
ious” probably, but surely not “mute.” The 
effect on him who heard and saw was rest- 
fully pleasing and exhilarating—a festive 
evening to be stowed away in memory’s 
happiest nook. 

Fully in accord with the festivity around 
them, our friends proceeded gaily along the 
shimmering lunar pathway outward toward 
the Lido, whose lights they could see shin¬ 
ing faintly in the far distance. Their gon¬ 
dola was not illumined, save by a little lamp 
at each end. It attracted but slight atten¬ 
tion, when compared with the brilliantly 




42 


Bethesda 


decorated craft carrying their vocal occu¬ 
pants. A young stalwart gondolier, evi¬ 
dently trained to his work from boyhood, 
was guiding it among them with uncon¬ 
scious ease. 

“Well, now!” exclaimed Crosby as he 
looked and listened, “if the music which I 
am to hear in the great beyond is any more 
sublime than this, I will be pleased to be 
translated at any moment.” “Possibly you 
may not find there a cool, magnificent sheet 
of water, like this, to enhance the melody 
floating over it,” suggested the Doctor. 
“However that may be,” continued Crosby 
as if the interruption had been expected and 
discounted, “I am perfectly sure of one 
other thing, and that is that we have, right 
here with us hopeful wanderers, a voice un¬ 
excelled by any of these ‘floaters.’ Come 
Billy, Old Boy, arouse your tuneful self and 
vie with these delightfully tuneful sons and 
daughters of old Italy. I used to hear you 
beat the best of them a few years ago in our 
Inwood home, and I will back your tenor to 
the limit.” “That was before I became a 
derelict,” answered Calhoun. “You may 




Bethesda 


43 


find that dissipation has touched the tone. 
But look, fellows, at what is coming over 
there. Jack, hand me those binocles, 
please.” 

He raised the glasses to his eyes and stud¬ 
ied intently the six occupants of a rapidly 
approaching gondola, decorated like most 
of the others. They were singing; and as 
they drew nearer, soon moving parallel with 
the direction our friends’ gondola was more 
slowly following, but twenty-five or thirty 
yards away, their soft, low melody held the 
trio in rapturous delight. And then came 
the unexpected. 

Alone, an exquisitely sweet soprano voice 
was singing '0 Sole Mio,’ that catchy 
serenada with which in the summer of 1914 
all the sunny land of its origin was vibrant. 
Instantly every other sound within its range 
was hushed. Then as the first stanza ended 
and the chorus began, across the moonlit 
waves Calhoun’s superb tenor joined in per¬ 
fect harmony. 

The effect was magnetic. The melody be¬ 
longed to the two singers, and they to it, 
even as the hosts of stars above belonged 




44 


Bethesda 


to the brilliancy of that incomparable night. 
They sang together— 

Ma natu sole cchiu bello chi ne } 

’0 sole mio sta nfronte a te, 

9 0 sole , ’0 sole mio sta nfronte a te, 

Sta nfronte a te, sta nfronte a te, a te. 

There was silence for an appreciable time 
after they had ceased; and then from all the 
merrymakers in the gondolas within hailing 
distance arose the hearty tribute of en¬ 
thusiastic applause. Calhoun and his two 
companions, who had sprung to their feet, 
waved their caps in respectful salute to her 
who had thus been his perfect companion in 
one of the sweetest duets that had ever 
graced those song-blessed waters. 

“My ‘vision’ sings like a bird,” he said dry¬ 
ly; “but I must now soothe my troubled 
spirit again. I have here a flask of the fin¬ 
est cognac that France can produce. It is 
put up in this wide-mouthed bottle to make 
it suitable for just such occasions as this— 
where drinking glasses are rather scarce.” 
He waved the flask gracefully toward his 
companions, and added:—“Drink to the 





Bethesda 


45 


health of the prettiest girl and finest voice 
on the lagoon tonight—to the finest and 
sweetest of them all." 

But both of them shook their heads. And 
Crosby exclaimed, “Why Bill, why don't you 
forget that stuff for a minute or two, and 
let us follow this Goddess and find out who 
she is, or at least where she is staying? 
Please put that down," he added as Calhoun 
raised the flagon to his lips and began to 
swallow copious draughts of the liquor. 

“The call came; the command was imper¬ 
ative," cried the drinker, replacing the half- 
empty bottle in his pocket; “and now I am 
happy again. But somehow I am not so 
happy as I ought, or thought, to be—per¬ 
haps I did not drink enough this time. Do 
as you please about chasing that angelic 
singer. I believe I really would like to meet 
her." 

“Well," said Ross, “it is now probably too 
late. Her gondola was going much faster 
than ours; and while you youngsters have 
been wrangling about those ‘spirits,’ it has 
turned toward the Grand Canal and gone 
off yonder among so many others adorned 





46 


Bethesda 


in the same way that you will find identi¬ 
fication very difficult. I fear you may have 
sold your mate right for a mess of cognac.” 
“Cally, Old Fel, if you had a bass voice in¬ 
stead of a tenor, and you had gloried in the 
name of Webster rather than in that of his 
political antagonist, history would have re¬ 
peated itself out here this evening, as you 
sang with your sweet Jenny Lind—of the 
Lagoon. Moreover, I think it is about time 
for us also to be heading toward the Canal, 
whether we find her or not.” 

They turned and went quite swiftly home¬ 
ward, and in a short half hour were ap¬ 
proaching the bridge of the Rialto. As they 
proceeded, it became more and more evident 
to Calhoun’s companions that this time he 
had imbibed more than enough merely to 
make him happy. He talked incessantly, 
and occasionally rather at random. He 
shifted his position frequently, and now and 
then glanced around as if in apprehension 
of danger. His hands toyed nervously with 
his pencil or watch chain. Evidently he was 
not the same calm, self-poised gentleman 
who had taken his seat in the gondola two 





Bethesda 


47 


hours earlier. As they approached the 
bridge, on which many people were stand¬ 
ing and under which many homeward- 
bound gondolas were slowly passing, he 
turned to the gondolier and said, “Please put 
me ashore for a little while.” In another 
moment he had leaped to the steps, run up 
them rapidly and stood near the middle of 
the parapet looking off toward the Grand 
Piazza. His arms were stretched out, as in 
a call for attention. 

His companions had followed, and stood 
eight or ten feet behind him, where the 
people had automatically formed a semi¬ 
circle about him and stood in an attentive 
attitude. Suddenly he reached for the half- 
empty bottle in his pocket, and raised it 
slowly to his lips. Then rang out, in a tone 
of stern command, the voice of Doctor Phil¬ 
ip Ross—“William Calhoun, STOP.” 

He looked around with a half smile and 
said quietly—“Too late Doc; too late.” And 
again facing the water, on which curiosity 
was holding the gay groups in many gon¬ 
dolas, he quaffed the rest of the liquor. 
Then he spoke in English, loud and clear:— 




48 


Bethesda 


“Sing on, sing on, Italia; sing on now, for 
your mirth will not be long. The hate of 
the North is coming again. Rome heeded 
when Cato cried and cried, Carthago 
delendum est —Carthage should be utterly 
annihilated. And the place of that doomed 
city was ploughed for the harvest. A hor¬ 
rible example was thus set for the demons 
beyond the Alps, and time sealed the sequel. 

“Oh! time, time, time, thou mightiest of 
the tomb-builders; well has it been said of 
thee that thou only rushest on, on, on; and 
never dost thou pause to sit and ponder, 
like other conquerors, on the fearful ruin 
thou hast wrought.” 

“I stood, a few hours ago, in time's classic 
and most noted ruin, the Forum. I faced 
the South, and looked in thought away off, 
across the blue waters, to Afric's shore, 
where Rome's furrows were made. Then 
I turned and saw, rushing down from the 
North, the followings of her frightful ex¬ 
ample set in the third Punic war. Through 
the long centuries, from the time of Attila, 
has it not been ruthlessly followed, more 
than a score and a half of times—until the 




Bethesda 


49 


plight of this devoted Continent may well 
be paraphrased in the words—‘Southward 
the course of hatred takes its way.’ ” 

“It is about to take that way again. The 
vast, accumulated venom of the Northland 
is rushing southward once more to fright¬ 
ful carnage. The first shot was fired a 
month ago at Sarajevo. Prepare; prepare; 
prepare.” 

“Look across your great northern ram¬ 
part. See the hosts of howling hell-fiends 
roaring down. Hear their hideous shrieks 
and yells as they come on. Listen. Look. 
They are almost here, the hideous monsters 
and loathsome reptiles, screaming, howling, 
hissing. Listen. Their eyes blaze flame; 
their tongues dart poison and death. They 
writhe, and squirm, and come on. 0! 
hideous fright. Look; look. Stop them.” 

“Ah! they hesitate. Will they return to 
their diabolical designs? See. Even the 
treasures which Napoleon filched from this 
fair city are hurling themselves back here— 
and they too seem to live, and howl with 
fiendish glee. And now all the damned crew 
come on again. They screech, and snap, 





50 


Bethesda 


and snarl, and gloat—and come. See; listen. 
They all draw closer, and hem us in, and the 
foul din is maddening. I feel their scorch¬ 
ing breath, as the fumes of hades. Their 
slimy coils are closing around me. Their 
stench is in my nostrils. Their horrible 
fangs are tearing my flesh. I am seized, 
poisoned, torn, broken, smothering. Oh! 
Help; help; hel—” 

He panted and yelled. His face became 
contorted and hideous. His body strained 
as if against the onslaught of countless 
fiends. He waved his arms wildly in the air, 
and pitched forward as though he would 
fall over the parapet into the water. 

A dozen strong arms seized him, in his de¬ 
lirium, and pulled him backward, as Doctor 
Ross hurried to his side. 

They took him tenderly to his hotel, 
watchfully and skilfully cared for and sur¬ 
rounded with every comfort and luxury; 
and Crosby sat by his bedside, as he slept 
under the soothing opiates through most of 
the remaining hours of the night. The next 
morning he was well enough for the trio to 
proceed on their summer’s tour. 




Bethesda 


51 


By the time Calhoun had been removed 
from the Rialto, the festivities had about 
come to a close. One by one the lights along 
the waters were extinguished; and the 
“Pearl of the Adriatic” went to sleep. 


At a window, whose light shone among 
the last upon the Lagoon that night, stood 
Ruth Overton, robed for bed. She was gaz¬ 
ing upon the wavelets, and half wondering 
if they did in reality scintillate most bright¬ 
ly away over there where she had helped to 
sing a duet. 





CHAPTER IV 


REPOSE 

Judge Andrew Overton and his daughter 
Ruth were sitting on a rustic bench, near 
the Kursaal in Lucerne, looking across the 
lake to the snow caps of the Alps. They 
were resting after a short walk along the 
shore. It was the first day of August, 1914. 
The sun would set in about an hour; and a 
day, during which that beautiful place like 
the rest of the world had breathlessly 
awaited news of the fate of Europe, would 
soon be drawing to a close. A calm, quiet 
restfulness, a repose which might seem a 
harbinger of eternal peace was upon the 
city and its environs like a benediction. 

They had been discussing the all-dominat¬ 
ing topic, the probable imminence of a gen¬ 
eral war. 

“I admit, my dear Dotty' 9 said the Judge, 


52 



Betliesda 


53 


“that I am frequently too optimistic; and I 
feel that it is perfectly natural for you and 
your good mother, in this overcharged at¬ 
mosphere of dread and apprehension, to 
fear that the great powers will soon be en¬ 
gaged in deadly strife around this little re¬ 
public. But I cannot, will not believe, till I 
see and feel and know it, that our civiliza¬ 
tion has not advanced beyond the possibility 
of such a catastrophy. Repose your confi¬ 
dence there, please, and tell me how you 
have been spending this quiet day in the 
loveliest part of peaceful Switzerland. For 
myself, I went up to Sonnenberg this morn¬ 
ing, had a nice little lunch there and played 
a game of golf with that interesting young 
Frenchman, Boze’, who has been casting 
glances at you up there at the Carlton Hotel 
Tivoli. And lo! when I meet you down 
here, I find you all worked up about war, 
just like everybody else.” 

She gave his arm an affectionate little 
hug, and said:— 

“You good old Daddy, there would not be 
any possibility of bloodshed, if only a few of 
the too many potentates on this continent 




54 


Bethesda 


were a little more like you. I am going to 
try not to be afraid any more. Mama and 
I spent most of the morning up in the Gla¬ 
cier Gardens, and having a rather lengthy 
parting look at the Lion of Lucerne. And 
then we did a little shopping—just to be able 
to say we bought some things in this ‘celesti¬ 
al city by this jasper sea.’ ” 

“And how were you impressed with what 
you saw?” 

“I like the gardens, symbol of the origin 
of things, better than the dear old lion, type 
of strife and loss and end of things. But I 
am still too much of an infant to set very 
much store by either of them. That is why 
I like you to call me ‘Dotty’—my baby name. 
My heart goes out, of course, to the heroic 
young Frenchmen whose spirits methinks 
would fain pull the broken spear from old 
Leo’s side. Yet my appreciative love re¬ 
sponds more fully to the living, sentient 
things around me—to the squirrels up there 
in the park that ate out of my hand; to the 
noble old collie, that met me on my way 
down here and affectionately rubbed his 
soft, shaggy mane against my arm; to those 





Bethesda 


55 


confiding pigeons thronging me the other 
day on the Venetian piazza; to the real, true 
life that sometimes seems to me to emanate 
from some condition of things far, far 
back of the beginning of what we call con¬ 
scious human thought or feeling. There 
seems to be no deliberate choice for me in 
such matters. It is made for me, as it were. 
Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sis- 
tine Chapel, or that of Tintoretto in the Du¬ 
cal Palace at Venice turns me away from 
thinking, or caring particularly about the 
future, even as the innocent children fled 
from Dante when he walked through the 
streets of Florence, and sends my longing 
and devotion to such another masterpiece 
as Botticelli’s Venus in the Ufizzi gallery, or 
Canova’s Cupid and Psyche at Villa Car- 
lotta. My soul looked through, or beyond, 
the waves around the new-born Venus, to 
the eternal paradise from which she came; 
and as I gazed on those spotless figures in 
the garden on the shores of Lake Como 
(peerless Como), there came over me a mys¬ 
tic sense of something, not forgotten, no, 
something that I cannot describe, foolishly 




56 


Bethesda 


perhaps suggesting the words the evanes¬ 
cence of memory, or the reverse side of a 
beatific dream of the long, long ago—my lit¬ 
tle Soul , rising again in me, and not afraid 
of anything/’ 

“Don’t laugh at me, Daddy dear, my chum 
and playfellow. You have always under¬ 
stood me better than anyone else—even bet¬ 
ter than dearest Mama—and I am not sure 
that that is saying very much even for you; 
there is so little of me to understand, and it 
is all so silly. But I just had to tell you how 
all these wonderful ruins and this celestial 
art and the vistas of history and the calls 
to nature worship, through and among 
which we have gone, have affected your lit¬ 
tle daughter. I want to be more a child than 
I did before. I wish to get closer and closer 
to all of those things that are genuine, and 
true, and beautiful, and holy. I don’t want 
to grow up and—and forget things. I long 
for all of God’s creatures, which are closest 
to his heart, to gather around me. And I 
want everybody—all the folks—to love me, 
not for the sake of poor little me, but be¬ 
cause they were born with that something 





Bethesda 


57 


within them, an instinct if you insist though 
to me it is something immeasurably higher, 
which will not let them do otherwise.’’ 

“Well, well,” he sighed. “You need never 
have any doubt or misgivings as to every¬ 
body and everything loving you to the limit. 
They cannot help it, any more than you can 
help being such a lovely little wiseacre. You 
are your mother’s own daughter. She will 
never be any older than she was when we 
were married. And you are always going 
to be my same little 'Dotty,’ even if some 
presumptuous young rascal does get to call¬ 
ing you Dot, or Ruth.” 

“By the way, as I was going to Sonnen- 
berg this morning, I met Colonel Oliver and 
his son, your playmate, Guy. They are stay¬ 
ing over yonder at the Schweizerhof. The 
Colonel said he wanted to talk with me a 
few minutes about some legal matters, and 
that he would meet me out here near sunset. 
Perhaps those two men down there by the 
trolley car near the bridge are they.” 

“Yes,” she answered, shading her eyes 
with her fan and looking closely. “Guy and 
his Pa are coming this way.” 





58 


Bethesda 


“All right. After you have settled away 
the old gentleman with your inimitable wel¬ 
come, just run off up the lake, for a little 
while, with the youngster, while we old fel¬ 
lows delve into his law problems/' 

The fan, which had shaded her eyes, now 
screened her face, while the Judge watched 
the approach of their friends. 

The greetings of the lifelong acquain¬ 
tances and companions were quietly cordial. 
They compared notes a little about the 
“tourists highways" along which they had 
traveled since leaving New York, expressed 
and repressed forebodings of an approach¬ 
ing conflict, and congratulated one another 
on being, for the moment at least, in one of 
the most peaceable as well as one of the 
most beautiful places in the world. Then, 
by a common impulse which called for no 
thought or analysis, the two young people 
found themselves strolling along the path¬ 
way by the edge of the lake, leaving the 
Judge and his long-time client to discuss the 
plan of legal and legislative procedure, 
which the latter had to some extent matured 
while he was crossing the sea. 




Bethesda 


59 


Richard Oliver was a man of business 
through and through. At the age of fifty, 
he was recognized throughout the United 
States as one of their most substantial cap¬ 
tains of industry; and his counsel was con¬ 
fidently sought and relied on in economic 
and business circles in New York City and 
State. He had brought, or thought he had 
brought, a serious business and social prob¬ 
lem with him, as he and his son had boarded 
the Lusitania two months ago and started 
on their largely care-free summer's outing. 
His clear gray eyes were fixed for a moment 
on the figures of the boy and girl slowly re¬ 
ceding along the lake; and turning to his 
trusted attorney and confidential advisor, 
he began the recitals and queries which he 
had promised when they had casually met 
earlier in the day. 

“Andy, you are aware of course of the 
fact that the Empire State has at last got 
thoroughly down to the job of perfecting 
and enforcing its Workmen's Compensation 
Law ? I left home before that law went into 
effect, July the first; but its dire operation 
on business in general, and on my business 




60 


Bethesda 


in particular, was very clear to me before it 
was enacted, and has become more and more 
so from the letters and cablegrams which 
have come to me during the last month. 
Why, in my iron foundry, where upwards 
of two thousand men are employed, there 
are at least two hundred who rarely touched 
alcohol in any form before the first of July, 
but who are now starting and rapidly going 
down the road to ‘tippledom/ and already 
bid fair to become hopeless drunkards. They 
are led into such a course largely by the fact 
that they can now drink, as it were, at their 
employer's expense. The risk of the results 
of their intoxication is completely shifted 
by the infamous new statute. Before its 
enactment and under the good old Common 
Law—the really American law as I view it— 
my laborer came at his peril to his work un¬ 
der the influence of liquor. For if he was 
injured while at his task and I could prove 
that his intoxication contributed materially 
to the result, he could not recover anything 
from me as damages. I did not have to be, 
so to speak, the guardian of my employees, 
all of whom were fully able and required to 




Bethesda 


61 


take care of themselves and answer for their 
own conduct, especially in the line of in¬ 
dulgence in intoxicants. That was right, 
and as it should be. There was no wretched 
socialism or communism about it. It was a 
proper, fair, square American relationship.” 

“Now if one of my men, while within the 
scope of his employment by me, is killed or 
injured as the result of an accident, I must 
respond in damages without regard to fault 
or cause of the injury, unless it is occasioned 
by his wilful intention to bring about the in¬ 
jury or death of himself or of some other 
person, or unless the injury results solely 
from his intoxication while on duty.” 

“Injuries to a drunken man very rarely 
result solely from his intoxication. And the 
worst of it is, as it appears to me, that it is 
always to be presumed against me, in the 
absence of substantial evidence to the con¬ 
trary, not only that my worthy employee 
had no wilful intent to injure any one, but 
also that his injury did not result solely from 
his intoxication while on duty.” 

“I do not forget the fact that the people 
of New York voted last year, by a very sub- 





62 


Bethesda 


stantial majority, for the principle of such 
a law and made it a part of our Constitu¬ 
tion ; and I know that, as a general economic 
proposition, it has been growing and gain¬ 
ing popular strength in our country and sev¬ 
eral others; and you know how I have al¬ 
ways stood strongly for the welfare—to the 
limit—of the laboring man. But, Judge, the 
feature of this new statute, which lets a 
man play fast and loose with the matter of 
intoxication—with alcohol, the worst enemy 
of the human race—and charge it up to his 
employer if he loses in the game is vicious 
to the core; and something ought to be done 
to rid us of it if possible. What I want you 
to do is to help us out of this difficulty. We 
can largely take care of the other troubles 
by insurance—such as the statute itself 
partly prescribes; and we will get along the 
best we can with the added burden, since 
such is the mandate of the State. But we 
must obviate, if we can, the awful effects of 
this inducement to intemperance. That is 
obviously a matter of morals, as well as of 
sound business. We must not let this mon¬ 
strosity now on our statute books become a 




Bethesda 


63 


co-laborer with the demon alcohol. You have 
always stood with us for the right as we 
have waged such contests; and you have 
generally won. Can you do so now?” 

“My dear Colonel,” responded Overton, 
“I am afraid you do not appreciate just what 
you are asking. I cannot help you, or the 
employers of labor in New York, or the cap¬ 
tains of industry in our country, in any such 
way as you request. That portion of our 
Workmen’s Compensation Laws, which 
deals with intoxication, is not an accidental 
or incidental feature. It is substantial and 
fundamental. It came into those statutes 
as naturally as the yolk comes into an egg, 
or the core into an apple. Society was pre¬ 
pared for the change in the law which you 
have described; and the change, the inver¬ 
sion of a principle as you say came inevi¬ 
tably. And it has come to stay.” 

“Said one of our ablest jurists quite re¬ 
cently:—The law of each age is ultimately 
what that age thinks should be the law * * * 
The reaction on the courts is that the exis¬ 
tence of a strong opinion in any real or fan- 






64 


Bethesda 


cied need has been suggested as the suffi¬ 
cient test/ ” 

“In so far as our industrial, economic and 
sumptuary rules and principles have been 
changed in conformity to such a criterion, 
you and I must adhere loyally to them; and 
I think we are whole-heartedly willing to do 
so. We both go at least one step further, I 
think; and in harmony with the majority 
of candid thinkers— though I for one never 
quarrel with any man for differing from me 
here—we feel that back of such thought or 
test applied by the masses, or by the capable 
few who appear on the surface to fashion 
the results, is an arbiter, a guiding hand, a 
providence, a something outside of and su¬ 
perior to ourselves, by whatever name we 
choose to call it—you and I can agree in call¬ 
ing it God—by whose counsels the times and 
circumstances of such fundamental changes 
are determined. This new law affecting 
drunkenness, of which you complain, ap¬ 
pears to me to be a striking illustration. The 
time seems to have come, in our land, when 
we could move forward to a higher plane 
in the care and protection of the laboring 




Bethesda 


65 


classes; and within the last half dozen years, 
with a unanimity which would be inexplic¬ 
able and bewildering but for our hypothe¬ 
sis, the Federal Government and the various 
States, in quick succession, have passed 
similar laws regulating such matters as the 
hours of a working day, criteria as to wages 
in many employments, restrictions on the 
labor of minors and females, and compensa¬ 
tion to workmen in cases of accident. The 
shifting of liability for injuries caused par¬ 
tially, even though very largely, by intoxi¬ 
cation is practically, if not necessarily, em¬ 
braced within that forward movement of 
our race; and so the change has inevitably 
come to stay.” 

“If you had been at home, Dick Oliver, 
during the time which you have more or less 
wasted recently on this benighted hemi¬ 
sphere, I would probably not have to finish 
this little argument. For then you would 
have learned, I think, like other real econ¬ 
omists and philanthropists of our beloved 
country, that it is for you, employers of la¬ 
bor to make this change as to drunkenness 
an incalculable blessing. You are going to 




66 


Bethesda 


do so by gradually putting into operation, in 
your foundries, factories and shops, a rule— 
made a part of every contract of employ¬ 
ment—that any workman, who is seen en¬ 
tering a saloon where intoxicating liquors 
are sold as a beverage, or found materially 
under the influence of such liquor, shall im¬ 
mediately be discharged from your employ¬ 
ment. This is being done extensively to¬ 
day ; and it will grow in favor—necessarily 
so—and go on and on rapidly with its ben¬ 
eficent results. Thus you bind up the so¬ 
briety of a man with his livelihood, with his 
means of supporting himself and his family. 
And let me tell you very confidently, from 
what I have already seen and learned and 
from what I cannot help expecting, that an 
influence, nay a mandate, for temperance is 
thus coming into the world, a method of cop¬ 
ing with the diabolical power of alcohol, 
more potent and far reaching than all other 
forces, maudlin, manly, reasonable, or silly, 
that have ever appeared before. So, my 
dear Dick, instead of retaining me, join the 
hosts of your fellows, who are making and 




Bethesda 


67 


enforcing such rules and agreements; and 
all will be well.” 

“You have put the matter better than I 
have ever heard it attempted before,” said 
Oliver; “and I thank you, my good old 
friend, very sincerely. I am not going to 
be away from my duties at home much 
longer; and when I get back I have no doubt 
but that, in all the industries over which I 
have control or influence, your counsel will 
be followed. Would to God,” he added with 
a sigh, “that my older son Gilbert were in 
such an employment that he could be 
brought rigidly under your rule. He drinks 
too freely; and we are all terribly worried 
about his future.” 

“I trust, and dare to believe that all may 
turn out well with him,” said the Judge 
gravely. “Guy, I know, has always been, 
and must be now I am sure, a very great 
comfort to you. I can just see the backs 
of him and that little girl of mine walking 
along the lake up yonder beyond the Kur- 
saal.” 

At the place which the Judge thus indica¬ 
ted, Ruth Overton was saying to her com- 





68 


Bethesda 


panion, about that time:—“Have you and 
your father been to the top of Rigi, or the 
Stanzerhorn, and looked on the endless vast¬ 
ness of this Divine scenery?” 

“No,” said Guy. “We have been traveling 
rather fast of late. And, hang it, tomorrow 
morning we are to leave here en route to 
Rome and Naples, and then the steamer for 
home. And since that is so, Dotty, I simply 
have to ask you if I may not hope more than 
you permitted me to do as I left you on the 
pier in New York. Of course, everybody, 
and especially every real man who sees you, 
loves you. No one can help it. But you 
know that I love you best of them all, and 
always will; and I want and beseech you to 
let me go away in the morning with the 
greatest blessing the world ever knew of, 
your promise to become my wife.” 

She looked at him earnestly and said:— 
“Now, Guy, my good old playmate and 
friend, please do not press that matter any 
farther now. You know we agreed to let 
it rest unsettled for a time yet, and—and 
I am afraid the time is not yet up.” 

“Well, at least tell me this now; or I won’t 




Bethesda 



go away at all tomorrow. Is there anyone 
else, who in any respect is standing in the 
way?” 

“No,” she said, looking at him and smiling 
somewhat demurely. 

They walked on in silence for a moment; 
and she turned to him shyly and said:— 
“Guy, do you suppose a person, a real per¬ 
son could ever fall in love with a voice?” 

He laughed a little nervously, and re¬ 
plied:—“Why of course not, you little An¬ 
gelic witch. I have often liked and admired 
voices, and so have you; but I can’t see how 
it could be possible to fall in love with them. 
But I say, Dotty little girlie, if you happen 
to do anything like that, will you at least let 
me be the echo?” 

“Why yes,” she laughed, “if you will not 
be too ardent in seeking for an amplifier. 
But here comes Mama—and see what a 
handsome old gentleman is with her. Doesn’t 
he look like a dear?” 

They quickened their pace, and were soon 
shaking hands with the older couple. Mrs. 
Overton, a trim, sweet little lady of forty 
years, whose motherly gaze in itself bestow- 





70 


Bethesda 


ed a benediction on them, introduced them 
to her companion, evidently a Scotchman, 
with a benign, scholarly face and white hair 
that fell in ringlets over his shoulders. 

“Rev. Dr. McCloskey,” she said. “He is 
to preach tomorrow, at the English-speak¬ 
ing church yonder on the hill; and we are all 
going over to hear a good sermon. This is 
the most restful and the most peaceful place 
on earth; and though war may threaten, he 
must speak to us of 'peace, perfect peace.’ 
But come now over to the hotel; and we can 
sit and gossip for a few moments, till the 
Judge gets back for dinner.” 




CHAPTER V 


BETHESDA 

There was no cloud in the sky as Judge 
Andrew Overton and his beautiful wife and 
daughter walked to Church on the morning 
of that fateful Sunday, the second day of 
August, 1914. They had left the Tivoli 
early; and, having plenty of time, after 
going a short distance along the lake to¬ 
ward the center of the city, they ascended 
the hill on the north till they reached the 
road which winds downward from Kleine 
Rigi; and turning to the left, they followed 
its meanderings toward the place of wor¬ 
ship. 

Their hearts were in harmony with their 
surroundings. The brilliant rays of the 
summer sun were shimmering over the plac¬ 
id surface of the lake, and scintillating 
from the ice points on the crests beyond. 


71 



72 


Bethesda 


The light, invigorating breeze was whisper¬ 
ing to the verdure on the hills and in the 
valleys a message of virile repose. Ex¬ 
quisite beauty and harmony pervaded all 
things visible. And it seemed as though the 
Soul of the Universe had chosen this par¬ 
ticular place and time, in which to vouch¬ 
safe to troubled humanity a definite promise 
of enduring peace. 

The Church edifice, where the services 
were to be held, was one of those mediaeval, 
Gothic structures, which emit from them¬ 
selves as it were a call to worship. It was 
well lighted, airy and spacious. Yet, when 
our trio arrived, it was already being rapid¬ 
ly filled, largely by tourists who in the dread¬ 
ed uncertainty of the hour turned spontane¬ 
ously to religious solace. Dr. McCloskey 
was sitting beyond and to one side of the 
pulpit. His smooth, benignant old face, 
crowned with its glory of white flowing 
locks, was also a call to worship, and like¬ 
wise an impetus to faith; and it bore as¬ 
surance that the words which he should 
speak would set forth unerringly the rea- 





Bethesda 


73 


sons for the faith and the ultimate founda¬ 
tion of the worship. 

The opening, devotional services were 
simple and dignified—mainly in the Scotch 
Presbyterian order. Their closing hymn, 
leading up to the sermon, was Watts’ au¬ 
gust description of God’s works and ways 
and His eternal fatherhood. The audience, 
composed as it was of men and women from 
every corner of the English-speaking world, 
sang it with a glowing earnestness:— 

“Our God, our help in ages past, 

Our hope for years to come; 

Our shelter from the stormy blast, 

And our eternal home! 

* * * * * 

Before the hills in order stood, 

Or earth received her frame, 

From everlasting thou art God, 

To endless years the same.” 

As the rich, sweet rhythm filled the audi¬ 
torium, Ruth Overton, who had begun to 
sing, looked up quickly from the hymnal 
which she was holding with her father; and 
the words died upon her lips. She gazed 
fixedly ahead of her for a second ; and then, 




74 


Bethesda 


recovering herself before any one had no¬ 
ticed her action, she looked down again de¬ 
terminedly at the book. She sang but little, 
however, for her. She was listening to the 
full, clear tenor, which a few days before 
had so unexpectedly joined with her ex¬ 
quisite soprano out on the moonlit Lagoon. 
So many finely trained voices were 
joining in the sacred praise and prayer that 
few others, if any, noticed particularly the 
glowing emphasis which that superb tenor 
gave to the music. And after the last stanza 
was sung, she sat quietly, as was her custom, 
and listened attentively to the sermon. 

The grand old Divine—frequently called 
“Father McCloskey” by his parishioners in 
Edinburgh, where he had spent the larger 
part of his life in loving pastoral work and 
profound study and thought, rose to his full 
six feet in height, slowly turned the leaves 
of the much worn Bible in front of him, and 
looking over the audience with the evident 
fondness of the true shepherd for his flock, 
began:— 

“My Good Friends, let me endeavor to 
bring to your minds, as well as to your 




Bethesda 


75 


hearts, this morning, a message of comfort 
and of hope—a message which may perhaps 
point out the way to grasp and utilize the 
good that normally belongs to men or to 
nations. 

“My text is a part of the fourth verse of 
the fifth chapter of the Gospel according 
to John— 

‘Whosoever then first after the troubling 
of the water stepped in was made whole of 
whatsoever disease he had.’ 

“The procession of the empires, which 
dominated Israel, was used to fix the pivotal 
point in human history. The world was in 
turmoil. There must be peace, universal 
peace, for the advent of the Son of God. 
Peace would not come by chance. There¬ 
fore the mighty nations around the Holy 
Land, each waxing stronger than its prede¬ 
cessor, acted their parts successively in re¬ 
moving the obstacles to the erecting of the 
Cross. Over the desert from the East, came 
the splendor and the power of Babylon; and 
Jehovali’s chosen people were carried away 
into captivity. Then, rushing forth from 
the far-flung city of Nineveh in the North, 




76 


Bethesda 


‘The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the 
fold'; but, even in their ultimate overthrow 
by Media and Babylonia they added largely 
in the sequel to the tranquility of the earth. 
It was only, however, after the vast hosts 
under Cyrus, surging up from the South¬ 
lands, had burrowed under the doomed City 
of Babylon, even while her besotted mon¬ 
arch trembled as he beheld the writing on 
the wall, and had transferred the sceptre to 
the wider sway of the Medes and Persians, 
that men could logically begin to think of 
an era of a world at rest. 

But the highest culture and military 
genius were watching from the West. At 
Arbela, three and a half centuries before the 
process should be complete, began the brief 
sway of him whose dominion was so wide 
that he sighed for more worlds to conquer. 
Even Alexander the Great, however, was 
never master of all that he might have sur¬ 
veyed. Vast trackless domains, beyond his 
wilfully narrow ken, were still in the tumul¬ 
tuous control of those whom his race called 
barbarians. A greater than he must come. 
The germ of that mightier force had long 





Bethescla 


77 


before begun to grow on the banks of the 
Tiber. It spread, and advanced, and multi¬ 
plied, until the victorious flight of its eagles 
was nowhere obstructed, ‘all roads led to 
Rome/ and there was peace over all the 
known world. 

“Then it was, and not possibly till then, 
that the Angels sang:—‘Glory to God in the 
highest, and on earth, peace, good will to¬ 
ward men/ Then, and not possibly till then, 
the Star went before the Sages from the 
East, ‘till it came and stood over where the 
Young Child was/ 

“There was nothing fortuitous in those 
mighty waves of conflict, which one after 
the other had thus smoothed off the rough 
places and prepared the way for the com¬ 
ing of the Prince of Peace. They moved 
according to the eternal plan of God, operat¬ 
ing in harmony with the free will of man. 
That plan prepared and erected the Cross, 
and to the Cross from endless aeons of eter¬ 
nities it will forever revert. Yes! Yes! 
Lord Byron, Thou art right— 

‘The mountains look on Marathon, 

And Marathon looks on the Sea !’ 




78 


Bethesda 


“Mountains, piled Ossa on Pelion, of wit¬ 
nesses of God's care and mercy beheld the 
race and sacrifice of His divine Son; and 
from His Cross, in harmony with that plan, 
each and every life of men and nations may 
look out across the clear expanse of their 
own experience, out beyond the Gibraltar 
of their own trials, out, out and on o’er the 
limitless ocean of God’s providence and love. 

“And the Child Increased in wisdom and 
stature, and in favor with God and men.’ 
One Sabbath day in Jerusalem, he walked 
out of the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, 
through the peaceful Court of the Gentiles, 
peaceful because He had forbidden it to be 
used as a place of merchandise, and over to 
the Sheep Gate, near which he healed an 
impotent man and bade him take up his bed 
and walk. 

“As he performed that miracle, he looked 
upon a representation in miniature of the 
way in which God moves, and shapes the 
destinies of men, and nations, and the world. 
For at that place was a pool ‘called in the 
Hebrew tongue, “Bethesda/’ having five 
porches. In these lay a great multitude of 




Bethesda 


79 


impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, wait¬ 
ing for the moving of the water. For an an¬ 
gel went down at a certain season into the 
pool, and troubled the water: whosoever 
then first after the troubling of the water 
stepped in was made whole of whatsoever 
disease he had/ 

“My dear friends, most of you have 
climbed the steps over yonder, up into 
the Glacier Gardens, to see what is 
said to be a crude illustration of a 
way in which the forces of nature were 
employed to fashion the mountains, the 
valleys and the plains, as we now be¬ 
hold them. In a far, far truer sense, the 
Divine Son of Man and those about him 
looked that Sabbath Day on a type, a sample, 
an illustration of the workings of the provi¬ 
dence and plan of His Father and ours in 
the destinies of men. The waters of this 
great world-pool of ours are troubled from 
time to time—at certain seasons—and the 
first then to step in after the troubling of 
the water, be it man, nation, or race, is heal¬ 
ed. 

“When the time is ripe, when the hour 





80 


Bethesda 


strikes, when the conditions and circum¬ 
stances are matured and right, for an im¬ 
portant discovery, a great invention, a bet¬ 
ter understanding of our lives or their en¬ 
vironment—for any forward movement of 
peoples, races, or nations; an influence, a 
troubling—call it a wave of thought, or a 
universal mandate, or an intellectual con¬ 
geries, or a psychic co-operation, or what 
you please; ultimately we will all come to 
know that it emanates from God—an in¬ 
fluence, a troubling, an impulse as mighty 
as the mind of its Maker goes over the vast 
pool of divine destiny by the side of which 
humanity is waiting; some man, nation or 
race, subsequently to be called benefactor, 
steps first into the water and is healed, with 
the ultimate result that, to some extent be it 
greater or smaller, mankind advances to a 
higher plane and becomes wiser, happier 
and better. My imperfect description of the 
‘procession of the empires, which dominated 
Israel/ sets forth the central, conspicuous 
instance of such processes. Let a few other 
facts of history, individual and national, be 
cited as illustrations. They stand forth, 





Bethesda 


81 


when we view them aright, plain and unmis¬ 
takable in both their processes and their 
products or results. 

“To the question, who discovered the 
great utility of steam and invented the 
steam engine, a casual investigator travel¬ 
ing over the globe would receive almost 
as many diverse answers as the number 
of different countries in which he 
should make the inquiry. England would 
say Watt, or possibly Worcester; France 
would probably name Papin; Italy would 
point to Branco, and Spain to Blasco 
de Garay. This would not occur be¬ 
cause of any intentionally wrong claim; for 
every one who responded to the query would 
believe he was right. In large measure he 
would be right. Our industrial and com¬ 
mercial interests called, by the middle of the 
Seventeenth Century, for such an advance; 
and the thought, the idea, the wave of in¬ 
fluence spread over the world, till here and 
there various men in various places stepped 
first into the water. 

“The growth of mathematics called for a 
calculus. Sir Isaac Newton on one side of 




82 


Bethesda 


the English Channel and Gottfried Von 
Leibnitz on the other, each in total igno¬ 
rance of what the other was doing, worked 
out the system required; and then they met, 
to be mutually astonished as they compared 
their but slightly different systems. 

“Sir Humphrey Davy, in his superbly 
equipped laboratory with his many assist¬ 
ants, experimented long and laboriously to 
produce a ‘safety lamp' for the coal mines. 
About the time when he was perfecting it, 
a poor laborer in North Wales, ignorant df 
all other efforts, was risking his life by car¬ 
rying down into the fire-damp an almost 
identical device. 

“The name of Professor Bell belongs uni¬ 
versally, and rightfully we may fairly as¬ 
sume, to the telephone. Yet the law suit 
against him and his companies, by that ob¬ 
scure inventor in Pennsylvania, Draw- 
baugh, revealed conspicuously one of not a 
few equivalent inventions, in different 
places, by persons unaware of the doings of 
the others. 

“Whoever succeeded in counting, when 
Roentgen announced the discovery of the 




Bethesda 


83 


X-ray, the number of voices that arose all 
over the earth, crying out, ‘we knew that'; 
'we were at work and well along in that line 
of investigation?’ Or who could begin to 
number the same kinds of people, who have 
shouted in the same manner about wireless 
telegraphy and the multitudinous radio- 
graphic marvels that are coming to our 
ears? 

"These are not, and have not been, impos¬ 
tors. They have seen the troubling of the 
water, and have moved forward to step in¬ 
to the pool. They sought healing, and many 
of them found it—at Bethesda. 

"No Norseman would ever admit that Co¬ 
lumbus first discovered America. He did 
not even succeed in giving to it his name. 
According to the understanding of most of 
us, when the time came for another conti¬ 
nent to be found, he was simply the first to 
step upon its shore. Many of the current 
disputes as to credit for other geographical 
discoveries are similarly explainable. The 
thought was abroad; and each one of sev¬ 
eral honest claimants insists that he was the 
first to feel and obey its impulse. 




84 


Bethesda 


“The same is true as to great crises in the 
lives of nations and peoples. They await 
the troublings. Appomattox, Yorktown, 
Trafalgar, Runnymede, Waterloo, Orleans, 
Philippi, Thermopylae, Arbela and Arma¬ 
geddon were not accidents or uncertainties. 
Each followed or embodied a preparation, 
a troubling of the water of the world pool, 
as truly as did the hardening of the hearts 
of Pharaoh and his servants and people be¬ 
fore the Red Sea. 

“Martin Luther, of course, did not inaugu¬ 
rate the Reformation. It came because 
Christianity was ready for its coming; and 
such superior ecclesiastics as were he and 
John Calvin, the Wesleys and John Knox, 
were merely among the first to experience 
the benign healings. 

“Florence Nightingale, true type of the 
best of our race, stepped first into the bless¬ 
ing of applying bandages, containing the red 
insignia of the Cross, to countless armies 
prepared for the loving service. 

“Neither William Lloyd Garrison, nor 
Henry Ward Beecher, nor Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, nor Wendell Phillips would ever have 




Bethesda 


85 


claimed any large share or part in the work 
of freeing the slaves in America. They knew 
that, like the unfaltering Martyr President 
who dared to sign the charter of freedom 
in the midst of conflict, they were rather 
the product than cause of a process which 
was sure to go on till the work was done. 
The time and occasion for that process had 
arrived; and it went forward as irresistibly 
as the troubling of the water by the Angel 
in the pool of Bethesda. 

“We have all come here this morning with 
anxious forebodings. Let us hope and pray 
for the best—for the peace which rightfully 
belongs to the status of the humanity of to¬ 
day. But we may go out from this sacred 
edifice, ere long, to behold the fearsome spec¬ 
tacle of the world at war. If that condition 
comes, it may be the mightiest of all troub- 
lings of this great pool of ours. And if 
so, some men and women, some nation or 
nations will step into the water and be heal¬ 
ed. And the net result will be some im¬ 
portant advance, some splendid onward 
movement of mankind—perhaps many of 
them. 




86 


Bethesda 


“We know not what that gain or those 
gains may be. We can hardly surmise. 
'God moves in a mysterious way 
'His wonders to perform: 

‘He plants his footsteps in the sea, 

‘And rides upon the storm/ 

“Let me briefly suggest, however, one heal¬ 
ing, one benefaction which would be a fit¬ 
ting and adequate compensation for so stu¬ 
pendous a price. I refer to the awful and, 
thus far in our day, the growing curse of 
intemperance. The awkward shifts, which 
we have thus far made against that satanic 
malady of man, the little palliatives, that we 
have tried to apply, and the fanatical ef¬ 
forts which our misguided zeal has often 
made seem to many of us thus far to have 
been worse than futile. It may be—God 
grant that it may be—that this frightful, 
barbarous conflict, if it come, may prove to 
be, inter alia , a troubling of the water 
against drunkenness, and that entire 
nations—for I believe the remedy must so 
come—may step into the pool and be healed. 

“God does not make wars. He would have 
to curb the freedom of sinful man’s will, if 





Bethesda 


87 


he were to prevent them. They may be, and 
frequently have been, used as the pool which 
His ministering angels enter and trouble— 
for the healing of the nations. Witness 
Armageddon, the Crimea, or the American 
Rebellion. The Omnipotent Healer, the Di¬ 
vine Physician will not let an unprecedented 
conflict of nations come and go in vain. 

“Jesus walked near the Sheep Gate on that 
Sabbath morning, and looked on a minia¬ 
ture of the works and ways of His Father 
and ours. Then he went steadfastly for¬ 
ward to his Cross, the Cross around which 
those works and ways, from everlasting to 
everlasting are ordained to move. Amen! 
“Let us sing the four hundredth hymn:— 
‘In the Cross of Christ I glory, 

Towering o’er the wrecks of time; 

All the light of sacred story 
Gathers round its head sublime.’ ” 

No melody ever proceeds from human lips 
more sublime than that which marks the 
approval by an intelligent audience of a pro¬ 
found truth well expounded. It is the music 
of the soul. It stirs and animates the best 
that is within us, more subtly than can any 






88 


Bethesda 


other harmony. With such feeling and ef¬ 
fect, the large congregation sang all of the 
majestic hymn which the reverend speaker 
had chosen and which epitomized his theme. 

When the audience arose to sing, Dr. Ross, 
who stood between William Calhoun and 
John B. Crosby, only three pews ahead of 
the Overtons, whispered to his companions 
after looking at his watch:—“It is time for 
us to be going if we are to catch that twelve- 
thirty train for Geneva.” The trio immedi¬ 
ately closed and laid down their books, and 
walking very quietly down the aisle, left the 
Church and hastened to the railroad station, 
to which their luggage had been sent early 
in the morning. And Ruth Overton looked 
inquiringly at them, as they thus turned and 
passed out between the rows of singers. 

Ten minutes later, when the congregation 
filed out into the bright sunlight, they were 
met on every hand by the direful news. A 
state of war had just been declared between 
France and Germany. The Kaiser’s armed 
hosts were already rushing into Belgium. 
The war of history was on. The troubling 
of the water, if it was to occur, had begun. 




CHAPTER VI 


THE TEMPERATE LIFE 

Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Oliver alighted at 
Lucerne, from the electric train which had 
come from Interlaken over the Brunig Pass. 
During the ride of five hours, their enjoy¬ 
ment of the lavish splendors of the ever 
varying scenery and the quaint aesthetic 
homeliness of the cottages that dotted the 
hillsides was enlivened by their interest in 
the many Swiss soldiers, who kept boarding 
the train en route to the larger city. For the 
little republic, the centuries-old haven of 
peace set securely down in the midst of 
neighbors frequently at war, the oasis ir> 
the desert of European belligerency was 
mobilizing its armies, along its frontiers, 
for a long period of preparedness and de¬ 
fense. Unknown to any of them, the hus¬ 
band and wife, in their travels north, had 


89 



90 


Bethesda 


virtually crossed the path of his father and 
brother, Colonel Richard Oliver and Guy 
Oliver, who had left Lucerne the previous 
day to proceed to Naples and take ship for 
home. 

Proceeding across the bridge and walking 
toward the Schweizerhoff, the young couple 
were surprised and delighted to meet Judge 
Overton, Mrs. Overton and Ruth, earnestly 
discussing the sermon on “Bethesda,” which 
they had just heard with such intense in¬ 
terest, and the new aspect which, during its 
delivery, things had taken on for them and 
everybody about them. 

“Well! Well!” exclaimed the Judge to Gil¬ 
bert, as hands were being shaken and kindly 
greetings exchanged, “I thought when your 
father and brother left here yesterday that 
you were remaining in New York, to look 
after those foundries and factories about 
which he was evidently indulging in some 
anxiety. And here you are, stranded with 
the rest of us in this focus of bedlam. How 
am I to account for all this?” 

The young man smiled faintly, and an¬ 
swered with but thinly-veiled evasiveness:— 




Bethesda 


91 


“Helen and I felt that we were tired and 
needed a rest as much as the others; so we 
just packed up and came away.” Overton 
looked at him fixedly, and readily surmised 
the cause of the evasion; for plainly discern¬ 
ible on the naturally handsome face were 
the marks of recent dissipation and excesses. 

In the meantime, Helen Oliver, on whose 
beautiful, pale countenance rested such a 
shadow as only grief and anxiety can cause, 
had gently drawn Mrs. Overton to one side 
and was saying to her:—“My best and dear¬ 
est of friends, I cannot begin to tell you of 
the joy and comfort which the sight of your 
sweet face here and just now brings to me. 
You have only to glance at my poor, dear 
husband, to see why I persuaded him to 
come with me away from home. His beset¬ 
ting sin, his cups were fast driving him to 
absolute ruin. The absence this summer of 
his father’s supervision of their many 
affairs seemed to make his recklessness 
worse, instead of better; and I just had to 
get him away, and with much difficulty suc¬ 
ceeded in doing so.” 

“Bring him over to my little tea party this 




92 


Bethesda 


afternoon at four,” said Mrs. Overton. “We 
are going to have only three other friends 
there; and we will have an opportunity for 
a good, quiet talk. You will come along to 
tea with us today, won’t you?” she added, 
turning to Gilbert. 

There were tears of joy in the troubled 
eyes of Helen Oliver, as she gratefully ac¬ 
cepted the invitation. While her husband 
was actually indifferent, if not slightly 
averse, to the “ordeal” as he regarded it, 
yet his natural urbanity caused him to say 
smilingly that they would come. And so, 
near the appointed time, the eight tourists 
were enjoying the delightful little repast, 
which Eleanor Overton had caused to be 
spread in the quaint pergola by the lake op¬ 
posite the Tivoli. The three other guests 
were Dr. McCloskey, the fatherly old Pastor, 
whose words had cheered so many stranded 
tourists in the morning, and Pierre Boze’ 
and his sister, Marie, young Parisians, who, 
like the Overtons, had been enjoying the 
beauties of Switzerland for several weeks. 
It was a congenial company. The world 




Bethesda 


93 


around was turning to chaos. But here 
were order, beauty and repose. 

Pierre Boze’, the rather stern looking 
young Frenchman, was the first to broach a 
subject which was uppermost in all their 
minds. He sat by the side of Ruth Overton 
and looked out rather pensively upon the 
waters of the lake, over which the declining 
sun was spreading a golden sheen. “We had 
expected,” said he, “to be in Paris today. 
But I am free to confess that this holdup is 
not at all unpleasant; and I am just now 
wondering how long we may hope it will 
last.” 

“Don’t figure on getting away from here 
very quickly, my good sir,” answered Gil¬ 
bert. “The scenes which we have witnessed, 
in the few hours since it became clear that 
a general war is inevitable, have convinced 
me that it is best for peace-loving folks to 
remain where they find peace and a reason¬ 
able promise of subsistence. I am going to 
stay right here, and try not to upbraid my 
good wife too much for persuading me to 
give up the comforts of home and brave sea¬ 
sickness, in order to get into this comfort- 





94 


Bethesda 


able prison, or perhaps I ought to say into 
these jail liberties.” 

“You had better call it a prison for a 
time,” remarked Judge Overton dryly; 
“for I opine that you will not leave Lucerne 
for some weeks to come. Gay Paris, they 
tell me, is aflame with rioting. Europe is on 
fire; and the scorching, I fear, is going to be 
long and dreadful. I trust that our good 
dominie here was right when he ventured, 
in his sermon this morning, to assert that 
the frightful ordeal will not be in vain, and 
almost to predict that, somewhere and some¬ 
how, some age-long evil or burden of our 
race, such as that of intemperance, will be 
suppressed or effectually curbed, as a sequel. 
I hope, and dare to believe, that he thus men¬ 
tioned an evil, to the proper stage for the 
suppression of which our race, or some 
great part of it—and I hope it includes 
America—has advanced or been led.” 

“Why America,” cried Mme. Boze’; “don’t 
you think that the older sinfulness of our 
part of the world needs it worse?” 

“I was thinking rather of the extent, the 
territorial magnitude of the nation or 




Bethesda 


. V 

V' 

•'*♦*'* , 

* M 1 

•a# 

95 


country which might be the first to step in¬ 
to the world pool, as he described it, when 
the water is troubled,” responded he; “and 
I have also been thinking rather hopefully 
since listening to his profound address, that 
the signs of the time point to our great 
‘Land of the Free,’ as the large place where 
absolute prohibition of the use of alcohol as 
a beverage might come, and stay. I add the 
word ‘stay,’ because the ephemeral efforts 
of small communities, such as cities, coun¬ 
ties, or even individual states of our country, 
to put down drunkenness and foster tem¬ 
perate living are among the most glaring 
failures of our civilization. It needs a large, 
strong, united country, with not many in¬ 
temperate near neighbors, to cope with such 
a problem. I believe, or at least hope, that 
the United States of America, by the heroic 
though sometimes fanatical efforts which 
have been made there in late years, and espe¬ 
cially by the changes in social and economic 
laws and conditions, may have been prepar¬ 
ing for such a stupendous undertaking. If 
it could only start aright there, it would 
succeed.” 




96 


Bethesda 


“I submit,” exclaimed Gilbert Oliver, 
“that our fair country would no longer be 
'the land of the free/ if it should do such a 
thing. How can you talk about maintaining 
personal liberty, in the same breath in which 
you suggest the total prohibition of one’s 
ability to do such an innocent act as to take 
a glass of beer when one is dry. We have 
gone far enough in America already toward 
taking away more of individual liberty than 
do most of the countries of Europe, even 
though they are monarchical in form.” 

The profound, good-natured jurist ad¬ 
dressed looked away for a few seconds, 
while an amused smile lighted up his hand¬ 
some countenance, and then responded 
kindly:—“My dear Gilbert, without at¬ 
tempting or desiring to enter into any con¬ 
troversy, let me try to make my position 
clear.” 

“Only that is liberty which keeps us free. 
There is no real freedom in temporarily oc¬ 
cupying a position which we cannot main¬ 
tain. A single man facing an attacking mob 
is not really at liberty, unless he is backed 
up by a force strong enough to prevail for 




Bethesda 


97 


him. Ever since the time of Noah, men 
have been deprived of their free will, as well 
as of their voluntary conduct as decent citi¬ 
zens, by the onslaughts of alcohol; and have 
tried to console themselves and others by in¬ 
sisting that they were not slaves. We would 
no more be deprived of our birthright as 
American citizens, by being prevented from 
becoming drunkards, than by being shut up 
in a stockade to escape the fury of onsetting 
savages. A national prohibition law, right¬ 
ly enforced in America, would be in reality 
a part of our coast defenses—a rampart 
against one of the worst enemies of our 
race; and within its inclosure ultimately we 
should all enjoy more liberty and certainly 
more happiness/' 

“May a woman's logic, or intuition, be 
tried right there," said Mrs. Overton. “The 
God whom I worship does not cause wars. 
Neither does he prevent the fury of men 
from causing them. If he did so, men would 
not be free. But he does not will for us strife 
and sorrow, but rather amity and happiness. 
Give us more happiness, real happiness, true, 
ethical, all-comforting happiness; and the 




98 


Bethesda 


matter of liberty will take care of itself. Re¬ 
move from our dear land the untold wretch¬ 
edness which alcohol causes; and we should 
have that added happiness. The arguments 
against effective prohibition always ignore 
the awful suffering and misery, usually 
unobtrusive, retiring, hidden and unknown, 
which flow from intemperance. If the 
agonies of the millions of mothers and 
wives, who silently suffer because of intem¬ 
perate habits of their loved ones, could all 
be focused in print some morning, as are the 
accounts of flagrant crimes, divorce suits, 
or political derelictions, not only would we 
know that liberty is not removed by pro¬ 
hibition, but we should rise en masse and de¬ 
mand our release from such a thraldom.” 

Helen Oliver sat by Dr. McCloskey, pale 
and motionless, during this discussion. It 
was only because the others studiously 
avoided close observation of her that the 
tears glistening in her downcast eyes, the 
stiffening of her posture and the convulsive 
clasping of her hands were scarcely noticed. 
She was hearing a resume’ of much of her 




Bethesda 


99 


life since she had married Gilbert Oliver, 
only two years ago. 

Ruth Overton was also visibly affected; 
but not in the same manner. Her cheeks 
were flushed. Her breath was coming 
quickly. She had sat in an attitude of ear¬ 
nest attention and expectancy. Suddenly 
she arose, and walking quickly around to 
where Gilbert Oliver was sitting and staring 
moodily at the ground, she stood behind 
him, with her hands resting on his shoul¬ 
ders, and began to speak. 

It was evident that she must talk well, if 
the words uttered in that exquisitely girlish 
soprano voice were to match in any degree 
her fresh, delicious beauty. Her delicately 
molded oval face was alight with the rays 
of the setting August sun, and aglow with 
the heightened color caused by excitement. 
Her lustrous dark blue eyes, in which was 
now a faint suggestion of tears of sympathy, 
reflected from their depths a soul, eager 
with youthful enthusiasm, that would ever 
be able to know the highest joy or the most 
withering sorrow and remain undaunted. 
They glowed with a brilliancy that would 




100 


Bethesda 


always be young. Her rich brown hair, 
touched with a slight suggestion of gold, 
was tied back loosely with a narrow band of 
white ribbon and hung down her back in 
loose waves to her slender waist. It was 
combed straight back from the clear, classic 
forehead, like her father’s, which bespoke 
mental capability and determination. The 
latter characteristic appeared also in the 
delicately molded chin, and the firm little 
mouth, which was now opening to utter 
words of girlish wisdom and resolve. She 
stood at her full height—scarcely more than 
five feet—robed in white crepe-de-chine, 
with her head thrown very slightly back¬ 
ward, and looked off toward the top of old 
Stanzerhorn, as if to read in his rugged 
summit the lesson which her glowing girl¬ 
hood desired to teach. 

“Dear Mr. Oliver,” she began, “don’t let 
them down you in this argument, even if 
they are five to one. For me at least, inex¬ 
perienced, unsophisticated little me, there 
is vital, eternal truth in what you have said. 
We must never let what wise men are 
pleased to call ‘advancing civilization’ 




Bethesda 


101 


smother the innate, and I may even 
say infantile, buoyancy of our being, 
the natural expression of which spells 
freedom, liberty, independence of thought 
and action. If total exclusion of the 
possibility of eating or drinking any¬ 
thing in itself harmless means such 
a smothering, it will never come in any 
permanent form for our race. The water 
of this world Bethesda will never be stirred 
to such an end. But ask yourself candidly, 
would the suppression of alcohol as a bever¬ 
age mean that—or would it mean it, to any 
greater extent, than temporally in appear¬ 
ance for the present generation of adult 
men and women?” 

“A few minutes ago, I saw one of those 
superb eagles, which occasionally fly over 
this lake, come apparently out of the hills 
over yonder in the north, and passing out 
there to the West of us, soar high above the 
water and on and on, till he was lost to view 
behind the cloud-capped peak of Stanzer- 
horn. I know not where he went; I care 
not where. For me his flight is over and 
done. He may never return. My curiosity 




102 


Bethesda 


asks whence he came; and what about the 
other eagles, or eaglets, that may follow 
from the same place. If we were interested 
in caring, we should care for them—for 
their future and their flights.” 

“It is so with the evils, which beset us in 
our flight across the minute span of our ex¬ 
istence here. Our own best ultimate inter¬ 
ests, as well as our eternal duty, in my child¬ 
ish opinion, call on us to clear them away 
if possible, even at some apparent expense 
to our own uncertain freedom. I am sure 
you would not refuse to join me in wishing 
for the net result—for the making of our 
dear land of the free a better place for 
those who are to come—to come from the 
eternal sphere whence are to emerge all the 
souls hereafter to inherit the earth. From 
permanent prohibition they would never 
experience any lack of liberty; for they 
would never appreciate the small loss of the 
ability to be intemperate, nor could they 
ever fully understand this inestimable gain 
for them which we had caused by forcing 
a temperate life upon them. Oh! I am car¬ 
ried away, perhaps unduly, by the possibili- 




Bethesda 


103 


ties opened up by our good Doctor McCloskey 
in his sermon this morning. If it requires 
a world war to bring in those possibilities, 
I for one am glad, though I cannot under¬ 
stand it all, that it may come. And I hope 
to be able to help, in some small way, to al¬ 
leviate the sufferings and burdens of this 
generation, which must endure an awful 
ordeal for the sake of some permanent good 
of humanity.” 

“Do I understand our fair orator to 
mean,” inquired Pierre Boze’ with a merry 
smile, “that if Bacchus, disconsolate, should 
sue for her hand, she might marry him, and 
proceed to sober down and reform him?” 

“No! No! No!,” she responded brightly. 
“If I had been in the plight of Ariadne, I 
should have remained on that beau¬ 
tiful island forever, rather than to 
have escaped from it by marrying Bacchus. 
She sacrificed herself with no good result; 
and, alas, how many, many of her poor sis¬ 
ters have followed her example ever since. 
No! No! my good Daddy let me get 
a diploma as a trained nurse; and if this 
war offers any opportunity for me to use my 




104 


Bethesda 


poor talents in that capacity, I know that he 
and Mamma will let me so employ them.” 

The good old Scotch minister had listened 
to the discussion with undisguised pleasure. 
He now looked, in his benign, fatherly way, 
at Miss Overton and said:— 

“My dear little lady, you talk like a phil¬ 
osopher, or even a real statesman. And I 
want to say to all of you, kind friends, that 
it is a very, very great pleasure to hear my 
feeble efforts at sermonizing approved so 
nicely and sincerely. My theme of this 
morning calls for the expression of one of 
my most profound convictions. And the in¬ 
stancing of a more temperate life for the 
world, or a large part of it, as a form of cure 
possibly to follow the stirring of the water, 
which now appears to be starting on a gi¬ 
gantic scale, was natural and perhaps very 
appropriate for a Scotchman, who has loved 
his people with ardent, life-long affection. 
Of course, we may not know, and scarcely 
dare to surmise as yet, what boon, reason¬ 
ably commensurate in size or degree, may 
follow the terrible ordeal through which we 
are evidently about to pass. We are justi- 




Bethesda 


105 


fied in saying, however, that, whatever it 
may be, it will come to stay—it will be per¬ 
manent. Whether we agree or not with the 
theory and argument of my sermon, the 
troubling of the water by divine agency 
when the world has been made ready for the 
cure, the advance to come; whether we look 
at it in that way—so natural and even neces¬ 
sary to me—or think of it as the act of 
Atropos in her cutting of the thread of fate, 
or treat it as the working out of natural law, 
or however we may explain or try to explain 
it; the fact remains that, when such ad¬ 
vances follow such occasions, such working 
out of events, there is never any retrogres¬ 
sion. The forward position so acquired is 
retained. Though there may be subsequent 
waverings, or temporary losses, or difficult 
readjustments, the gain, the ultimate ad¬ 
vance is secure and permanent, and there 
appears to be no power that could cause it 
to be otherwise.” 

“The path trodden by the Children of 
Israel across the Red Sea could never have 
been retraced by them. The procession of 
the empires, which cleared the highways for 





106 


Bethesda 


the Prince of Peace, was as inevitable as His 
coming. Nothing could have made the Re¬ 
naissance go backward. Slavery could 
never have been restored in America after 
Abraham Lincoln affixed his signature 
to that fateful proclamation. And while 
we think of that sublime deed, let us 
note that many things occurred in its sequel 
as to which the wisest of men thought it 
would have been better otherwise, and that 
possibly they might be proving that that act 
of emancipation was to eventuate in failure. 
One of those things, for example, was the 
early putting of the ballot into the hands of 
the erstwhile slaves. And the carpet bag¬ 
ging of that period, and the nameless 
atrocities which fostered the rise and ques¬ 
tionable activities of the Ku Klux Klan 
were outcropping evils of the stupendous 
social and economic revolution which fol¬ 
lowed possibly too much haste. But in and 
through, and perhaps to some extent by vir¬ 
tue of it all, the great advance has endured, 
for the eternal welfare of mankind over all 
the globe/' 

“So it will probably be, as to any real ad- 




Bethesda 


107 


vance, that may emerge from this war. 
God grant that, among other things, it may 
be for all mankind the living of more tem¬ 
perate lives. The changes may occur too 
rapidly, or too largely. Manifest evils may 
increase in their wake. The real good may 
be widely denounced as wholly bad; and it 
may seem at times as if it were all a retro¬ 
grade movement, rather than a forward 
step. But, coming as a logical, necessary 
result or attendant of the great conflict— 
being truly a stepping into the water which 
is troubled—like the abolition of slavery, it 
will survive such trials, conflicts and contra¬ 
dictions and be as enduring as the mind of 
God.” 

As the good Doctor ceased speaking, a 
page came from the hotel, and handed a tele¬ 
gram to Pierre Boze\ Tearing it open and 
reading it hastily, he turned to his sister and 
said:—“This calls for our return to Paris 
as soon as possible. So, instead of remain¬ 
ing semi-prisoners with these lovely friends, 
we must brave all the new dangers of the 
tedious journey and hasten home tomor¬ 
row.” 




108 


Bethesda 


“We are all so sorry,” exclaimed Mrs. 
Overton. “We shall miss you both very 
much. And I wish to express, for my hus¬ 
band and daughter I know as well as for 
myself, the great pleasure which this quiet 
little gathering and earnest, kindly ex¬ 
change of ideas have brought. While our 
hearts are filled with forebodings, our hopes 
and our faith have been brightened, and we 
shall all be stronger and better for what has 
been said and thought.” 

“We are always made better and stronger 
by association with our dear, sweet little 
hostess,” remarked Gilbert Oliver. And 
his kindly, courteous sentiment was warmly 
and unanimously applauded. 




BOOK II 


THE TROUBLING 






CHAPTER VII 


RIOT 

San Francisco had its earthquake, and 
Paris its war. For the first week of August, 
1914, the French Capitol was feeling the 
presage of its supreme shock. Through 
Luxembourg and Belgium, its ruthlessly 
savage foe was rushing upon it, and within 
its own borders was the unparalleled fright¬ 
fulness of mob rule and lawless violence. 

With the order for mobilization of the 
army had come wild enthusiasm on the 
boulevards and in the public places. Crowds 
numbering many thousands fell into mili¬ 
tary formation; and, led by men bearing 
and waving the French, Russian and British 
flags, marched through the streets singing 
the “Marseillaise.” Women and children 
gathered on the sidewalks, and wept and 
shouted hysterically. The excitement in- 


m 



112 


Bethesda 


creased from hour to hour. When the 
paraders, growing more and more turbu¬ 
lent, passed or espied Germans, they shout¬ 
ed the “Marseillaise” and yelled “Consquez 
V Empereur Guillaume ” Before nightfall 
the mob spirit had swelled and augmented, 
until, in many quarters, the stores and resi¬ 
dences of the enemy's nationals were being 
stoned and clubbed and torn to pieces, and 
their owners or occupants were fleeing or 
hiding away, as best they could, in their 
search for safety. Men so frenzied do not 
stop to make much distinction; and the re¬ 
sult was that many innocent persons besides 
Germans were injured. The vicious and 
criminal elements took advantage of the 
situation, of course, and plied their ne¬ 
farious trade and did their hideous deeds to 
excess and with comparative impunity. 
That night, and a few that followed it, dis¬ 
graced by mobs and rioters with whom the 
struggling authorities were unable ad¬ 
equately to cope, mark a brief chapter in the 
history of the fair city which she would 
fain expunge. 

Early in the evening, Dr. Philip Ross, 




Bethesda 


113 


John B. Crosby and William Calhoun 
emerged from the Hotel Continental, which 
faces the Jardin des Tuileries; and, stroll¬ 
ing a short distance down Rue de Rivoli, 
turned into Avenue de L’Opera, and were 
soon seated comfortably at a table in the 
Cafe’ de la Paix. Their dinner was soon 
ordered; and the problems which the war 
was presenting to them, in common with so 
many tourists, were being seriously dis¬ 
cussed. 

Since leaving Venice, soon after Calhoun 
had experienced his first really bitter en¬ 
counter with his master, Alcohol, as hereto¬ 
fore related, they had enjoyed the lavish 
beauty of the Italian lakes, crossed to Inns¬ 
bruck over the Stelvio pass, and from there 
as a point of departure and return, had 
traversed the beaten paths of the Tyrol, and 
spent a few days amid the weird attractions 
of the Dolomites. Then, after a few days 
in Vienna, they had proceeded in leisurely 
manner to Basle, and followed the somewhat 
circuitous but favorite route from there via 
Schaffhausen and Lakes Constance and 
Zurich to Lucerne. It had been their in- 




114 


Bethesda 


tention to penetrate farther into the Swiss 
Alps. But arriving there on the first day 
of August, the imminence of the war had 
caused them to change their itinerary and 
proceed the next day to Geneva en route to 
Paris, where they had arrived after a tedi¬ 
ous and difficult journey, tired but eagerly 
expectant, a day or two before the mobiliza¬ 
tion of the French legions had begun. 

The Doctor and Crosby had appreciated, 
from the hour when Calhoun came to them 
in the “Europa,” that a very delicate and 
difficult task was theirs during their sum¬ 
mer's outing planned so many months be¬ 
fore—the task of endeavoring to help their 
beloved comrade to escape from the hor¬ 
rible doom toward which he was rushing. 
Their poignant dread and pity increased 
from day to day, after Calhoun’s remark¬ 
able conduct and collapse at the bridge of 
the Rialto, and his terrific night in the pur¬ 
gatory that followed; and their determina¬ 
tion also grew apace to hold him back from 
the abyss if possible. By every word and 
deed that their skill or tact could employ or 
suggest, they were struggling to lift him, 




Bethesda 


115 


fine, joyous, delightful traveling companion 
that he was, away from the horrible slough 
into which he seemed determined to plunge. 
One of those efforts had resulted in their 
attendance at Church in Lucerne, where 
they had listened to Dr. McCloskey’s sermon 
of hope and comfort on “Bethesda.” There 
was now added to their problems the query, 
what should be the course of each or all of 
them in view of the oncoming conflict? 

Dr. Ross had been insisting, from the hour 
when it was apparent that war was coming, 
that it was his duty to stay in Europe and 
care for the wounded and suffering. “I 
have pondered the matter very fully,” said 
he, “and am now determined to do all in my 
power to ameliorate suffering during this 
mighty conflict. As for you two youngsters, 
my feeling is that you are both free to be 
of real service to the Allies, and you ought 
to stay here and fight. Our own country 
will be in this, I think, before very many 
months. Let us all get into the game ahead 
of her.” 

“With all my heart,” said Crosby. “If 
France or England will have this poor Yan- 




116 


Bethesda 


kee, in I go. And how is it with you, Billy, 
Old Boy? Is there any reason why you 
should hurry back across the big pond, to 
get away from your good friends who have 
been so busy trying to keep you sober ?” 

“Never mind Jack’s nonsense,” laughed 
Ross, as he glanced a little apprehensively 
at Calhoun. “You know that we have al¬ 
ways sought your good, even if we have 
been bores sometimes, and you have per¬ 
sisted in drinking as you pleased. But let 
me say to you frankly, Bill, even in a fath¬ 
erly way if you please, that here is your 
golden opportunity. They will not let you 
use alcohol in the army; at any rate you 
cannot get it in the wholesale manner to 
which you have been accustomed. Too 
many drinks, and the guard house, you 
know; a few good drunks, and confinement 
at hard labor. Good—very good! But seri¬ 
ously, old Chap, this opportunity has come 
providentially, so far as you are concerned. 
In the language of that fine old ecclesiastic, 
for whom you sang at Lucerne, The water 
is troubled/ and you may be the first—of 
us three at least—to step in and be cured.” 





Bethesda 


117 


“0! I’ve been thinking about it too,” said 
Calhoun carelessly. ‘Til cogitate about it 
a little longer. It’s becoming trite for me 
to tell you fellows how genuinely thankful 
I am for your well directed efforts to keep 
me sober. Now and then, you know, you 
have had your reward. Fairly and honestly 
I ought to reform for your sakes, if for no 
other reason. But truly, my good friends, 
it is too late. So here’s to the very finest 
success for both of you—for one as the best 
surgeon at the front, and for the other as 
Captain, or Colonel, or even General Jack.” 

He drank a large glass of champagne, 
while the others sipped theirs with care. 
“Come,” he cried, “let us soon be viewing 
these turbulent boulevards. Paris is going 
to be a lively town tonight.” 

On leaving the cafe’, they walked over to 
the Place de la Concorde; and turning 
south, strolled along Rue de Rivoli toward 
the Hotel de Ville. It was indeed a “lively 
town,” through which they were passing. 
Noisy throngs were parading the streets 
everywhere, shouting rather than singing 
the Marseillaise and other national songs, 




118 


Bethesda 


throwing hats into the air, and waving flags 
and banners, with an energy frequently 
bordering on frenzy. The spirit of patriot¬ 
ism, excited and tense, was rapidly rising 
and swelling to the sweeping aside of re¬ 
straints, and the dominance of fierce riot 
and terror. 

When the trio reached their hotel, Dr. 
Ross announced that he had seen and heard 
enough for that day, and went up to his 
room; but as he turned away, he bestowed 
on Crosby, when Calhoun was not observ¬ 
ing them, a look of quiet concern and re¬ 
quest for their genial companion, whom 
they had come to regard somewhat in the 
character of a ward. The two younger 
men proceeded leisurely on their way, great¬ 
ly interested in the kaleidoscopic views of 
Parisian enthusiasm and excitement. Near 
the base of the statue of Joan of Arc, now 
wreathed in freshly cut flowers, and gar¬ 
landed always with the reverence of a na¬ 
tion, a young man with the mien of an as¬ 
cetic was haranguing the crowd, amid re¬ 
peated cheers and applause. Two or three 
blocks further on, was a shop, dark and 





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119 


empty, with its front door and windows 
shattered, a silent witness of the fury which 
a short time before had killed or driven 
away some Teutonic trader or sympathizer, 
and made off with his wares. Opposite the 
Louvre was a surging mass of humanity, 
temporarily defying the efforts of the Gen¬ 
darmes to disperse them, in the middle of 
which a German voice was heard crying 
for succor. Such ultra ardent patriotism, 
such riotous turbulence would soon subside, 
and France would settle down stolidly to 
the stupendous task of winning the greatest 
of all wars. But tonight her metropolis 
was nervously aflame. 

Calhoun insisted on stopping, too often to 
suit his companion, at a cafe', and drinking 
wine or cognac. Planning to get him away 
from them for a time if possible, Crosby 
directed their steps toward the Luxem¬ 
bourg gardens. He hoped that there they 
might enjoy, for an hour or two, the peace 
and quiet of the place, away from the allure¬ 
ment of the saloon. 

Sauntering past the Palais de Justice and 
crossing the Seine, they proceeded along the 






120 


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Boulevard Saint Michel . Near the entrance 
to the Park, their progress was suddenly 
impeded by a group of singing, yelling en¬ 
thusiasts, rushing into the boulevard; and 
they turned into a narrow, dark street or 
lane, to seek a way around the human ob¬ 
struction. They had gone forward only a 
few steps when Crosby, who was walking 
slightly in advance of his companion, was 
seized firmly by the arm and pulled toward 
a dark passageway between two of the low, 
black houses. Calhoun was about to spring 
to his assistance; but noting that the person 
who had seized him was a young woman 
and that Crosby, while surprised, did not 
appear to act altogether involuntarily, he 
paused for an instant. As he did so, another 
girl, running as if for her life, panting, wild¬ 
eyed, her unbound hair streaming after her 
as she ran, hurtled into him, brushed him, 
almost falling against a newel post and 
rushed wildly onward, After her, laughing 
and cursing in a breath, came a low-browed, 
swarthy, besotted ruffian, who had taken 
advantage of the preoccupation of the 
throng in the boulevard to accost her. Al- 





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most he was upon her as he sped past Cal¬ 
houn down the dimly lighted street, when 
the latter regained his equilibrium and gave 
chase. It was a wild scramble, which con¬ 
tinued for several minutes over the rough 
pavement of the narrow, crooked lane. The 
lumbering but swiftly moving brute, who 
was not aware that he was being followed, 
was gaining slowly but surely on his prey. 
His great, rough hand was on her shoulder 
and covered by her disheveled hair, which 
his bestial grasp had torn loose as the pur¬ 
suit had begun. She threw her arms wildly 
in the air, gave a piercing shriek, reeled and 
was about to fall with his grasp tightening 
upon her, when a swift blow of Calhoun’s 
fist brought her clumsy assailant to a stand¬ 
still. He turned with a coarse oath, while 
the girl, wresting herself free and dashing 
forward a few paces, turned in time 
to see the two men, both rendered less cap¬ 
able by alcohol, fighting as skilfully and 
furiously as their respective conditions 
made possible. 

The burly ruffian, who was evidently a 
Spaniard, yelled, “Ah> perro Ingles /” and 





122 


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flung forward upon the lighter man to bear 
him to the ground. But Calhoun, whose in¬ 
telligence and will power had responded 
quickly and largely submerged the effects 
of the liquor at the demand of peril, had 
evaded the onslaught by a quick sidestep; 
and had delivered another telling thrust 
upon the face of the brute. Then the girl, 
with clasped hands, helpless and distraught, 
watched them exchange blows, with energy 
and fierceness worthy of more sober com¬ 
batants. 

The youth, training and agility of the 
lighter man soon decided the contest; and 
the swarthy Spaniard sprawled helpless on 
the sidewalk. Calhoun then sprang to the 
girl, who was leaning against a wall, and 
moved as if he would put his arm around her. 
The effects of the wine in his brain and the 
violent ordeal through which he had just 
passed apparently had rendered him incap¬ 
able of seeing, at once, that she was a dif¬ 
ferent creature from the one who had seized 
the arm of Crosby a few moments before. 
For an instant, also, his innate manhood and 
gallantry had been merged in what he after- 




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123 


wards regarded as a species of spontaneous 
passion. 

His movement seemed to restore her 
strength and self possession. She stood 
erect, drawn to her full height, her bright 
black eyes flashing, her pretty lips slightly 
apart, her cheeks suffused with rich south¬ 
ern blood; and as he paused, she said in low, 
measured tones, speaking in English but 
with a prominent French accent:—“Sir! 
Would you dare to imitate the villain from 
whom you have saved me? If so, your con¬ 
duct would betray your looks. Be so good, 
please, as to go, and leave me to find my 
home. ,, 

He too was restored to himself. He step¬ 
ped a little away from her and, bowing 
slightly, said:—“I am not fit even to offer 
you an apology. I am completely sober now, 
however, and I beg of you to let me at least 
so far try to make amends for my drunken 
insult as to see you away from this dan¬ 
gerous place and safely home.” 

She hesitated, and looked at him keenly 
in the dim light. He became aware of the 
searching scrutiny of a beautiful, young 




124 


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lady. He bowed his head and murmured:— 
“I have no right to expect any but a harsh 
judgment. Go on; and if you will not abso¬ 
lutely forbid it, I will follow you, at a con¬ 
siderable distance away, and keep watch 
over you until you are safe. Here is my 
card. Command me in the future; and make 
any complaint against me that you may 
think proper. I will not complain." 

The challenge was too frank and honest 
to be ignored by her anger, or even her fear. 
She had made him master of himself, and 
he spoke with convincing candor. She look¬ 
ed into his keen, honest eyes, saw only sin¬ 
cerity mingled with regretful confusion, 
put aside her fright with an effort and 
said:— 

“I will trust you. Please come with me 
as far as my home, which is not very far 
away. My brother and I had a stroll in the 
Park after dinner, and had just come out 
into the boulevard on our return, when that 
mob of people came suddenly around a cor¬ 
ner and we were separated from each other. 
I was nearly knocked off my feet: and when 
I recovered myself and looked around for 





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125 


my brother, he was nowhere to be seen, the 
crowd was hustling and howling itself down 
the boulevard, and that beastly Spaniard 
was coming toward me in a way that made 
me turn and run, without noticing that I 
was pitching into this dark street.” 

“Probably your brother is somewhere 
near us looking for you,” said he. 

“Perhaps," she answered. “But he may 
have gone home first, thinking that I prob¬ 
ably did the same after we were separated. 
I hope I may find him there. We have only 
a short distance to go to the home where we 
and our ancestors have lived for several 
generations.” 

They walked on in silence for a time, while 
Calhoun was trying to collect his thoughts 
sufficiently to make some half decent apol¬ 
ogy for the lamentable conduct toward her, 
into which his unsober condition had be¬ 
trayed him. At last he said:— 

“There is no adequate excuse for a man, 
who at least would like to act as a gentle¬ 
man, to offer you for my beastly behavior. 
But please believe me when I tell you—per¬ 
haps my breath and appearance have al- 




126 


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ready told you—that I had been drinking so 
much as not to have entire control of my 
hasty impulses. My dear old traveling com¬ 
panion tried to induce me to stop, but I 
would not. I fear, nay I am sure, that I never 
will stop. But you sobered me up, more 
quickly than any one or anything has ever 
done before.’’ 

She looked at him for a moment; and 
sympathy and pain were written on her 
beautiful face. “You saved me,” she said 
simply, “and I thank you. And let me dare 
to ask you not to say you will never escape 
from the awful fate of a drunkard. You 
are too young, and evidently have too much 
to live for, to talk or think in that way. You 
are an American, are you not?” 

“Yes,” he said, and then he gave her a 
brief account of how and why he became in¬ 
temperate, and ended with his now oft-re¬ 
peated lament—“Alas! it is too late.” 

She walked on silently and thoughtfully 
until they reached the door of her home. 
Then she turned to him an earnest, beseech¬ 
ing gaze, handed him a neat little card, and 
said:— 




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127 


“There is a mighty conflict beginning 
here, in which you may be of real service to 
humanity. That may save you from the fate 
you expect and dread. Fight for France— 
for the world. Come and see my brother, 
and I am sure he will help you to a fitting 
place in our army. Court, rather than re¬ 
sist, the restraints which will thus surround 
you, and you may be rescued. I am sure 
you will thus be saved.” 

He thanked her heartily, and said he 
would consider her suggestion very care¬ 
fully. Then they shook hands as good 
friends; and he turned toward the river 
after she had closed the door behind her. 
He glanced at the card, which she had given 
him, and read, “Marie Boze’ — ‘Rue 
Lhomond, Paris." 

He walked, and looked, and listened, and 
thought, while the noise of the great city 
grew less and less around him. 

What says the voice of a City’s life, when 
the night is growing still? 

May it sooth the soul of a hopeless man, 
or sway his stubborn will? 




128 


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Can the coming fate of a nation great, be¬ 
yond the soft sea's foam, 

Then mirror in the thoughts of him who 
wanders far from home? 

The walk back to the Hotel Continental is 
lonely for the wanderer, William Calhoun. 
But later as his head lies on his pillow, there 
comes to him the vision of a noble land freed 
from a blighting curse of the ages. He is 
back upon its shore—on it, but not of it. 
One more radiant than the dawn stands by 
his side, and offers him a flagon whose con¬ 
tent is sparkling red suffused with a golden 
glow. As he reaches out his hand to take it, 
a voice of ineffable sweetness comes sing¬ 
ing across the troubled waves. He looks 
and lo! over there silhouetted against the 
horizon, she stands as it were on the water; 
and on her shoulder is a creature whose im¬ 
maculate whiteness but matches her own at¬ 
tire. Is it a dove, or an Angel? She takes 
it gently in her delicate hand, and directs 
its course. It flies, straight as an arrow to 
him, takes the flagon in its beak, and soars 
away—off, off, off, and away, till it is lost 
to view. 




CHAPTER VIII 


DISCIPLINE 

“He is too good a man to be treated in 
such a manner, Captain Loubet. He is one 
of the best of the few Americans who have 
come over to help poor old France in her 
extremity. I know his entire country, heart, 
soul and body ought to have been in this 
fight long ago, and it is a beastly shame, an 
eternal disgrace, a horrible crime for it to 
stay out. But two wrongs cannot make a 
right, even between a desperate nation and 
a self-sacrificing foreigner. He ought to be 
brought back here, and replaced in the hon¬ 
orable position that he has so nobly 
adorned.” 

The speaker, Jean La Franc was sitting 
astride a rickety camp stool, in the worn, 
dilapidated tent of the French officer ad¬ 
dressed. It was on the outskirts of Doua- 


129 



130 


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mont, recently recaptured for its final hold¬ 
ing by the French. Vaux was soon to fol¬ 
low, before those master strokes of Nivelle 
in the early days of November, 1916; and the 
attack on it was now in full swing. In one 
of the few, short lulls in the fighting, a group 
of ten or twelve men from the ranks, de¬ 
voted admirers of Lieutenant William Cal¬ 
houn, had come, as a representative com¬ 
mittee, to present what was generally re¬ 
garded as his just cause to Captain Loubet, 
and to ask that energetic action be started, 
as soon as possible, to have their favorite 
officer released. La Franc was a whole- 
souled young private, who was punctuating, 
in his energetic way, the more formal peti¬ 
tion just presented by other members of the 
committee. 

“Is he being treated so very badly ?” ask¬ 
ed the Captain. 

“He certainly is,” exclaimed La Franc. 
“For one good generous drink of Scotch, 
taken after he had gone over the 
top and just returned from hell, he 
was closely confined in the guard house 
for two weeks, and then sent out in- 




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to the forest near Haucourt, where he 
has been living on meagre rations and 
compelled to chop wood from eight 
o'clock in the morning to nine o'clock at 
night for ten days more; and no end to such 
persecution of him appears to be in sight. 
By the way, the American doctors sug¬ 
gested that hard-labor system of punish¬ 
ing military recalcitrants; but it is a mon¬ 
strous iniquity to inflict it on poor Calhoun, 
even if he is one of their own countrymen. 
The matter should be taken up to Mangin, 
or Petain, or some one high enough in au¬ 
thority to put an end to such an outrage, 
even to Nivelle himself if need be; and you, 
Loubet, are the man to see that it is done, 
or at least to show us how it may be accom¬ 
plished." 

“With all my heart, Boys," said Loubet. 
“It is not to treat our men unfairly by any 
possibility, but to throttle the Hun, that we 
are here. But in order to help you to make 
any appeal or plans for him, or to be of any 
real assistance to this good young Ameri¬ 
can, I ought to know more about him. Have 
I been informed aright, Boze', that you are, 




132 


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to some extent, sponsor for him and 
can tell us something of his history ?” 

Pierre Boze\ who was one of the com¬ 
mittee, stepped closer to the Captain, sa¬ 
luted, and stood at attention , to narrate 
briefly the story of William Calhoun, since 
the time when he had decided to follow the 
advice of Marie Boze’ and endeavor to con¬ 
quer his inveterate enemy, Alcohol, by plac¬ 
ing around himself the restraints of the 
French army. The many months of stren¬ 
uous service, which Pierre Boze’ himself 
had rendered to his country and the world 
since that time, had left their marks indel¬ 
ibly upon him. He appeared at least ten 
years older than he had seemed only a little 
more than two years before, when he and 
his beautiful sister had enjoyed so much the 
hospitality of Mrs. Overton and the ani¬ 
mated discussion around her table in the lit¬ 
tle pergola by the shore of Lake Lucerne. 
His black, piercing eyes were as keen and 
penetrating as ever, and he stood if possible 
more erect, and certainly with a firmer pose. 
But the black, closely cropped hair was fast 
being tinged with gray; the lines on the 





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133 


forehead and furrows in the cheeks had 
very perceptibly deepened and strengthen¬ 
ed; the lips were more firmly set, and the 
strong, square chin united with these to in¬ 
dicate a forceful, energetic, mature man 
who had aged rapidly under the stress and 
strain of military life. He, too, was now a 
commander of men, and came with the com¬ 
mittee practically as its leader. He stood in 
thought for a moment, and then spoke calm¬ 
ly and deliberately. His speech was in the 
vernacular, of course, as was true of all 
present; and what they said is freely trans¬ 
lated here. 

“I think that William Calhoun is one of 
our best and bravest soldiers, and should be 
released from his imprisonment and punish¬ 
ment and restored to his command. He has 
been passing through a terrific ordeal since 
he came to the colors of our beloved 
country.” 

“He went to Paris in the first days of the 
war; and one night, during the riots which 
disgraced us there for a short time, he had 
an unfortunate, rather humiliating experi¬ 
ence, which was due to his subserviency to 




134 


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strong drink, and the details of which I need 
not relate. Suffice it to say that there was 
no moral turpitude, nothing disgraceful, 
nothing belittling in what he did—merely a 
slight, temporary lapse from sterling man¬ 
hood, for which he very quickly atoned. But 
it made a very deep impression upon him; 
for his life, I believe, is absolutely clean and 
pure, except for his then rapidly increasing 
thraldom as a slave to strong drink.” 

“The lamentable affair, largely revealing 
to him as it did the lengths he had gone 
toward hopeless inebriety and the horrible 
abyss over which he was standing, caused 
him to follow the advice, which he had re¬ 
ceived several times that day, and to seek 
the restraint which military life would 
throw around him.” 

“He came to me the next day, and request¬ 
ed what little aid I could give him in joining 
our colors. He told me, very frankly and 
quite fully, the story of his former promis¬ 
ing life, and especially how he had become 
a slave to strong drink, and that because of 
its growing mastery he could see no goal for 
himself other than a drunkard’s end. We 




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135 


agreed that his one chance of release was 
the opportunity which the war afforded. I 
offered to aid him in every way I could; and 
from that day to this I have done all in my 
power to redeem my promise to him. He 
has served France as faithfully and heroic¬ 
ally as could any of her own sons. Cheering 
his men in the most dangerous places, he has 
been always in the van. The French com¬ 
manders have frequently remarked, when 
he has gone almost to the point of culpable 
disobedience in his reckless heroism, that 
the American seemed hardly to understand 
the meaning of the word ‘stop.’ ” 

“Especially during this year, here about 
Verdun, in service practically continuous 
and unbroken, he has displayed dauntless 
courage and had splendid success. At Hill 
304, and Le Mort Homme, on the Douamont 
ridge and at Fort Vaux, Thiaumont and 
Fleury, at the Haudromont Quarries and 
generally over the Woevre plain, his valor 
and splendid leadership have told magnifi¬ 
cently for the good of France and the Allies 
and the carnage-cursed world.” 

“He went over the top ten times while we 




136 


Bethesda 


were regaining Douamont last month. His 
one and only irregularity, with all his hero¬ 
ism, has been excessive drinking. No one but 
himself seemed to know where he got the 
alcohol. Good Scotch, rum, cognac, wines 
and sometimes even beer seemed to come 
to him by magic, and he had them in spite 
of all the restraint, pains and penalties of 
our rigid rules and discipline. He was not 
alone, of course, in his flouting of regula¬ 
tions. His superior officers did not seem to 
be aware of his defections. Probably they 
winked at them, as they naturally are prone 
to do in such cases, especially in favor of so 
good a soldier. So he fought well and much, 
and drank more.” 

“But one day he came back from ‘no 
man's land’ so thoroughly intoxicated that 
he could not give any intelligent account of 
where he had been; and he was trying to de¬ 
liver an ovation—something about ‘Sirens 
singing on the sand dunes/ And then came 
the guard house.” 

“Is that all they put him in for?” laughed 
Loubet. 

“Well,” answered the narrator, “he man- 




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137 


aged to give the ‘guards' the slip, one fine 
morning, and was out for three or four 
hours; and when they brought him back, he 
was such a pessimist that he started to ‘clean 
up’ everybody and everything in sight. So 
they sent him over yonder to fight it off with 
an axe in the forest. There ought to be 
something more and better done for such a 
man. There is one other American here, on 
our committee, one of the ablest surgeons in 
our hospital, Dr. Philip Ross. He has known 
Calhoun for a long time, Captain; and we 
want him to tell you about his good chum.” 

“Tell us his story, Doctor,” said Loubet. 

Dr. Ross rose slowly to his feet and sa¬ 
luted. He was the same quiet, earnest, 
good-natured gentleman who had met poor 
Calhoun, more than two years before for 
their summer’s pleasure tour; but there was 
a more intensified seriousness in his expres¬ 
sion, a deeper, more poignant sense of the 
stupendous call of great suffering upon the 
heart-strings of his noble profession, a full, 
rounded realization of the mighty needs of 
his struggling, heroic brothers. He told, in 
a voice clear and strong but touched with 





138 


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pathos, of how his friend had been led, as a 
mere boy, into habits of intemperance by the 
fatuous zeal of well-meaning fanatics; and 
how he had dreamed and argued for a time 
of what he even dared to call ‘communion’ 
with the Spirit of Alcohol. He described his 
direful awakening to the truth during that 
frightful night in Venice, when the lone 
human soul seemed to be struggling for 
freedom against thongs that bound him 
Prometheus-like, to an adamantine doom; 
explained the efforts that he and Crosby, 
by tact, skill, patience and energy, had made, 
to convince him thereafter of his ability to 
escape from the thraldom, and to lift him 
out of the “slough of despond” from which 
he seemed almost determined never to rise; 
and pointed out how, buoyed up by the ill- 
deserved but gracious words of Marie Boze’ 
and aided by the influence of her good broth¬ 
er, he had joined the French army and 
fought for over two years with reckless 
bravery against the Hun, while he waged, 
with the well designed but often uncertain 
aid of military discipline, a fiercer fight 




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139 


within against the hellish power of his re¬ 
lentless foe. 

“And the last time I saw him,” said the 
Doctor, “the issue was yet fearsome, and 
he was still repeating his piteous, heart¬ 
rending prescription for more drink—Alas! 
it is too late.” 

“I wish I had words to describe to you,” 
continued the noble Doctor, “my own feeble 
conception, based on long experience and 
observation, of the condition, experiences, 
struggles and hopeless suffering of such a 
man as he. Let me make an effort to do it 
briefly.” 

“Probably no sadder commentary was 
ever put forth on the acme of human frailty 
displayed in our dealings with the vital, des¬ 
perate evil of intemperance, especially our 
governmental treatment of it, than that 
which appeared, on the other side of the 
Channel toward the end of the last century, 
in a sentence—ironical I believe and hope- 
written by a ‘Society to promote the control 
and cure of Habitual Drunkards,’ after the 
British Parliament had ‘heroically’ enacted 
a law merely sanctioning the existence of 




140 Bethesda 


retreats for the unfortunates, but providing 
that admission to such asylums was never 
to be compulsory. It said that the society’s 
committee had every confidence that, ‘pro¬ 
vided only adequate opportunity be afford¬ 
ed, many confirmed drunkards will gladly 
avail themselves of the power of isolation 
for a time from the many temptations by 
which they are surrounded.’’ 

“Vain, foolish hope, based on an absurd 
law—a law like so many hundreds of those 
which preceded and have followed it all 
over the world. Ordinarily a dipsomaniac 
will not shut himself off voluntarily from 
the means of gratifying his insatiable crav¬ 
ing. His disease—certainly one of the most 
horrible of all diseases—impels him, usually 
with irresistible force, in the other direc¬ 
tion. We must strike immeasurably harder; 
we must go to the root of the evil and ex¬ 
tract it wholly, in order to cope with any 
success at all with the hideous malady.” 

“But let the fact be carefully noted, Cap¬ 
tain Loubet, that in young Billy Calhoun we 
find a splendid exception to the general rule. 
He knew, in the summer of 1914, when his 






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141 


loyal chum, John Crosby, and I were doing 
everything in our power to check him, that 
he was rushing along the path of ‘habitual 
drunkenness' with amazing speed. Yet he 
turned voluntarily, and deliberately placed 
himself under what he then conceived to be 
the effective restraints and control of the 
French Army. I know well how he felt, and 
from what he then longed—though even 
then he hardly hoped—to escape." 

“He is a gentleman of superior strength 
and ability, both physical and mental. When 
he began to drink unduly in his ‘dry' New 
Jersey home town, the usual feeling of ex¬ 
hilaration, of wellbeing in both mind and 
body grew insidiously into his young life. 
This phase of his experiences continued, in 
his strong, pure vitality, much longer than 
is usual in cases of such excessive indul¬ 
gence. The advance of the malady to the 
whirl of excitement and tumult of ideas, in 
which the victim loses his sense of prudence 
and self government in his bestial fits, was 
especially slow in one so bright and pure and 
strong; and when at last he had admonition 
of the approach of that stage in his decline, 




142 


Betliesda 


with all its sad recklessness and indiscre¬ 
tions and its hideous derelictions and vices, 
he took apparent refuge in flight across the 
sea, and joined Crosby and me for a sum¬ 
mer's outing." 

“But the horrible ordeals, the piteous re¬ 
grets, the hellish agonies, compared to 
which the Vulture's tearing of Prometheus 
bound should be described as trivial, were 
already approaching, and indeed were upon 
him. He was trying desperately to per¬ 
suade himself that he was still merely 'com¬ 
muning' with his wine. He talked to us in 
that way when we met him in Venice. But 
my eye was sufficiently trained to see his true 
condition, and to see also that it was really 
known by him, even though he was more or 
less consciously endeavoring to conceal it 
from himself." 

“Before leaving Venice, he had a some¬ 
what premature attack of delirium tremens , 
probably hastened by his stubborn fight for 
self mastery; and after that, in full open 
confidence, he told us of his desperate strug¬ 
gles and terrible, sickening ordeals. Our 
ardent efforts to help him, and both Jack 




Bethesda 


143 


and I certainly did our best, seemed like the 
staying force of a child's finger on a moun¬ 
tain rent by an earthquake." 

“Poor Calhoun's struggles with himself, 
and against himself, and against the fiend¬ 
ish power that was throttling him, were a 
verification of Camoens' medieval epic 
‘ Lusiad / in which Bacchus is made the per¬ 
sonification of evil warring against Jupiter 
the Lord of Destiny. The combat was al¬ 
ways on. The strife was terrific but uneven. 
His morbid appetite, craving relief and find¬ 
ing it temporarily and more and more fre¬ 
quently in renewed indulgence, was hurling 
him onward toward those recurring par¬ 
oxysms, which presage the ultimate in¬ 
veteracy of the drunken habit and hopeless 
inebriety." 

“And then came the war, and his hope in 
the life of a soldier. Alas! the refuge which 
he sought seems to have proved ultimately 
to be a vain delusion. No doubt, his active, 
heroic service has postponed the wretched 
end; but, contrary to his own expectations 
and those of his friends, he has been able 
somehow and to a large extent to obtain the 




144 


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apparent relief which his insatiate craving 
has demanded, and he has gone on, fighting 
his cruel disease even harder than his splen¬ 
did heroism has fought the Hun—but all in 
vain.” 

“It will do him no good, but added harm, 
to keep him a prisoner at hard labor. Get 
him released, Captain; and let him be given 
the last desperate chance asked for in his 
own letter, which Jack Crosby has here with 
him. May I ask to have that letter read.” 

“Yes, Mr. Crosby,” said Captain Loubet, 
“let us hear the poor fellow's request.” 

John B. Crosby, who was a member 
of the committee, and who also revealed in 
his soldierly poise and more serious visage 
the effects of two years of strenuous mili¬ 
tary life, arose and saluted; and proceeded 
to read the following epistle. 

“In the Woods, 
November 8,1916. 

My dear Jack, 

Thank you most heartily for the offer of 
assistance—just like you— which they man¬ 
aged somehow to get through to this useless 
prisoner yesterday. 




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145 


Let me admit, Old Pal, that my ease is 
just about hopeless. You know how I have 
struggled against the agonies and terrors of 
hell, while I have—necessarily it seems to 
me—plunged into them more and more by 
my excesses. You will appreciate the hope¬ 
less outlook when I tell you that, even here, 
I get rum frequently. 

Alas! it is too late. There is no hope. 
But let me add, if it will give any comfort 
to you, that if there could be a possible 
chance of escape for me, it would have to be 
in the attractions of such continuous dan¬ 
ger and its consequent excitement and im¬ 
petus as would possibly keep me from think¬ 
ing of strong drink, while I was fighting to 
win my own freedom or give up my worth¬ 
less life. 

You catch what I mean, do you not? Is 
it worth while to try to have me assigned to 
a place or places of such great and unceas¬ 
ing danger and call for recklessness that I 
may have a chance of that kind? If so, 
please make the effort. Nothing else will 
begin to have any effect. 

You know how my heart yearns to you 




146 


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and our splendid Doctor. Salute him for 
me; and do what you and he think best. My 
poor, blasted existence is not worth the 
effort you may make. But I thank you 
again, with all my being, for all you have 
done, or may do—or try to accomplish. 

Your devoted but disgracefully besotted 
friend, 

Bill” 

“In spite of all he says and all that may be 
said about him,” added Crosby, “he has led 
a purer, better life than have I; and I hope 
and trust that this half-uttered request of 
his, the last I fear that he will ever make, 
may be granted.” 

It was a solemn group of men, to whom 
Captain Loubet responded, after a percep¬ 
tible pause and clearing his throat:— 

“It shall be done, I promise you, if we can 
possibly bring it about.” 




CHAPTER IX 


HEROISM 

The ultimate Argonne drive was begin¬ 
ning. It was fittingly fated that the first 
blows of the stupendous movement, which 
was to culminate a few days later in the 
premature “armistice,” should be struck be¬ 
side Valmy, the place where, a century and 
a quarter before, France had made her first 
determined and successful stand against her 
same Teutonic foes, for the priceless liberty 
of her then new republic. In 1792, her “raw 
recruits” had placed Valmy field among the 
crucial battle scenes of history; and now, 
with the dauntless aid of the offspring of 
the “embattled farmers” of Concord, Lex¬ 
ington and Bunker Hill, the splendidly 
trained, thoroughly seasoned, superbly 
equipped descendants of those earlier heroes 
were in like manner to hurl back and crush 


147 



148 


Bethesda 


the strongest forces that the barbarous ene¬ 
mies of freedom could muster. Marshal 
Foch was placing “Argonne” by the side of 
Valmy, Tours, Blenheim, Waterloo and 
Gettysburg, even while he was making it the 
beginning of the end of the world’s colossal 
struggle. It was, and always had been, the 
same struggle, for the same unending cause, 
the centuries-old contest between the spirit 
of freedom and the snarl of despotism. The 
valor of Valmy was still vivant; and what 
Americans with French aid had been en¬ 
abled to bring to pass at Yorktown in 1783, 
now in 1918, Frenchmen with the assistance 
of Americans were to see accomplished at 
the Argonne, and thence were to behold the 
same along the far-flung line to the end of 
Flanders field. 

If shades of kindred glories of the long 
ago gather about the cradle of new-born 
greatness, then a mighty group of spirit 
sponsors witnessed the opening of the Ar¬ 
gonne drive. 

The French forces, with interspersions of 
a few Americans, some of whom had been 
with them during most of the war, were 




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149 


starting the onslaughts, which were soon to 
carry them through the Hindenburg Line; 
while a few miles further north, the “All 
American” divisions were doing essentially 
the same thing. Forward and yet forward 
they were now to go, until the call of 
“peace” should come. 

From the ridge of a hill several miles in 
length and occupied by French artillery, 
commandants in charge of their respective 
sections were using their binoculars to des¬ 
cry, in the faint palor that heralded the 
dawn and was aided slightly by the pale 
rays of a half-spent moon but more by ex¬ 
ploding shells, the range of heights miles 
away that marked the line of the enemy. 
They were in the midst of a woodland ruin, 
caused by the German “monsters” in re¬ 
turning the French fire. A mighty tempest 
of shells had been raging among the 
beeches, pines and oaks, until scarcely a 
tree stood whole and in its natural position ; 
while among them, marking the surface 
with rain water becoming green and 
moldy, were pools that filled the deep, 
circular holes caused by the explosions of 




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the enormous missiles. Hidden under the 
branches and concealed with exact care in 
order to escape the observation of the ene¬ 
my's birdmen, were the French cannon, 
with their monstrous nozzles pointing to¬ 
ward the foe. For three hours all of these 
had been rending the air with shrieking and 
bursting explosives, and blazing a trail of 
demolition, the very destructiveness of 
which would save thousands of French and 
American lives. Away off over yonder, 
lighted now more by the bursting shells 
than by the gradually augmented rays of 
the dawn, was silhouetted the range of 
heights containing a series of strongholds 
which the Germans had deemed invulner¬ 
able. They were soon to know their mis¬ 
take. 

As the docile monsters were loaded, fired 
and reloaded with amazing rapidity by the 
artillerymen, scarcely visible in their cam¬ 
ouflaged coverings except as their kepis ap¬ 
peared now and then above the encircling 
bushes, earth work and debris, there was 
faintly discernible in front of them, zigzag- 
ing endlessly across hill, valley and plain, 




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the apparently thin line of trenches from 
which ere long the infantry would pour 
forth, this time never to return. From 
those “crevices” in the ground, advancing 
column squads would swarm out in regular 
succession, spread abroad widely, and move 
steadily, with never a pause, their progress 
being rendered more gradual by the bar¬ 
rage, which preceded them and rolled on¬ 
ward not faster than twenty-five yards per 
minute. 

Those subterranean fortifications, from 
which they were to come and in which they 
had dwelt for months, were curious pro¬ 
ducts of combined care for the greatest pos¬ 
sible safety and the natural longing of man 
for a place of abode as nearly like a real 
home as possible. Men lived in them, deep 
down below the surface with their tortuous 
lengths and cross corridors, somewhat as 
ants live in their carefully constructed 
houses; and yet comforts and even luxuries 
were there, according to the tastes and 
means of their respective occupants. Armo¬ 
ries were there, mess rooms, sleeping quar¬ 
ters—with rows of berths made with planks, 





152 


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similar to those in a ship—even shooting 
galleries, and endless corridors and cross 
tunnels, forming a veritable labyrinth of at 
least semi-cozy dwellings. They were sub¬ 
surface bungalows. Most of them had been 
embellished by their temporary occupants, 
with photographs, paintings, cartoons, and 
even tapestries, or apologies for such orna¬ 
ments. Along the sides toward the enemy 
were loopholes and some broad, low win¬ 
dows of the mitrailleuse; and here also were 
many benches on which the watchers stood. 
Those lookouts, peering forth like quarter¬ 
masters surveying the sea from the bridges 
of ships, observed between themselves and 
the enemy’s lines a desolation so complete 
and appalling that its description could not 
be surpassed by that of any inferno. 

And now comes the command to go “over 
the top.” A watcher stationed on a hill 
back of the abodes of those troglodytes, to¬ 
ward where the cavalry is emitting endless 
tongues of flame and a roar and din that 
make his brain quiver, sees the first column 
emerge from the ground and move forward 
steadily, regularly, up a slight incline till 




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153 


they reach the crest, and then gradually 
vanish on the other side. After the first 
wave conies a second, and then a third, in 
such deliberate, untroubled fashion that 
they seem to have gone miles before the first 
clatter of the machine-guns is heard, mak¬ 
ing itself keenly appreciated even amid the 
deeper toned tumult of the shells. The ar¬ 
tillery of the enemy impedes them but 
slightly, because it has been reduced to im¬ 
potence by the counter fire of the French. 

In the foremost of these columns advanced 
William Calhoun and his dauntless friend 
Jack Crosby. They had been separated fre¬ 
quently, sometimes for months, during the 
war; and each had served, as the chances of 
arduous military life fell out, in several dif¬ 
ferent parts of the western front. For a 
time, in the Spring of 1917, Crosby had ser¬ 
ved with the English, and had been sent as 
far away as Gallipoli. But whenever occa¬ 
sion offered, he sought the same sphere of 
action as that of his boyhood chum; and now 
they were marching side by side, over No 
Man’s Land, in the van of the attacking 
French infantry. It was in harmony with 




154 


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the plan and constant advice and efforts of 
Dr. Ross, serving always with unflagging 
zeal in the hospitals at the front, that his 
two young friends were together as much 
as possible. 

Calhoun was a private. He had pre¬ 
ferred, sought and retained that humblest 
position since being released from hard 
labor and put back into the ranks, near the 
end of 1916, chiefly through the intercession 
of that Captain Loubet to whom the com¬ 
mittee of his friends had appeared, as de¬ 
scribed in our last chapter. For nearly two 
years since that release he had been wag¬ 
ing with himself a warfare more fierce than 
that of Hercules with the Hydra, a struggle 
against the demon within him, compared 
with which his courted and frequent en¬ 
counters with Uhlans and machine guns had 
come to be like a spring day’s pastime. He 
was not naturally reckless, nor unduly for¬ 
ward or presumptuous in his bravery. But 
after his imprisonment and severe discipline 
near Douamont, he had formed a grim, dog¬ 
ged determination to shake off from himself 




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155 


the dominion of alcohol, or to die in the at¬ 
tempt. 

His plan was simple. It had been fore¬ 
shadowed in his letter to Crosby, read be¬ 
fore those staunch friends who had pleaded 
for him with Captain Loubet. He would 
not only struggle with every ounce of man¬ 
hood within him to carry out his fierce de¬ 
termination, with God’s help, to throttle his 
monstrous enemy; but he would remain a 
private and beg for, and insist on, obtaining 
assignments to the most dangerous posts 
and positions and to places of the most ar¬ 
duous labors. He would give himself, if 
possible, no time to think of strong drink, 
no opportunity for its indulgence. 

Was an observer’s head to appear above 
the top of the trench and become a target 
for Prussian sharp shooting? Let it be his 
own. Was a wounded comrade to be sought 
and brought back from No Man’s Land amid 
the explosion of German shells and the more 
sneaking fire of Hunnish snipers? He must 
be one of those to endure the ordeal. Was 
a machine-gun nest to be cleaned out, and 
its agile Boches who were not sent into 




156 


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eternity safely ensconced in the prisoner’s 
pen? He must help, or must even attempt 
the job single-handed if permitted to do so. 
He must be so busy that he would not get 
drunk, so exposed to German missiles and 
gas as to avoid the attacks of John Barley¬ 
corn. He must take every advantage pos¬ 
sible of the position, into which the world’s 
catastrophe had enabled him to get, to over¬ 
come one of the fiercest masters that ever 
dominated the passions of men. 

From the time of Noah, and his daughters, 
scientists, philosophers, economists, mor¬ 
alists, theologians, wise men, fools and fa¬ 
natics have reasoned much and argued more 
about the power of that master. William 
Calhoun, strong, noble, clean, superior youth 
bodily and mentally as he was, knew that 
that Satanic master readily acquires irresis¬ 
tible dominion over the bodies, minds and 
souls of men. He did not theorize. The 
months and years of delusion for him had 
ended. His almost certain failure in the 
struggle was always plainly before him. 
Yet he was determined to win. For nearly 
two years, he had been fortifying that grim 





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157 


determination and doggedly pressing on¬ 
ward toward the hoped-for success. 

Since the time when he had fully realized 
the sinister subtlety of his foe and under¬ 
stood accurately the nature of the horrible 
quagmire into which he had blindly yet joy¬ 
ously fallen, the varying phases of his con¬ 
test had frequently appalled, always inter¬ 
ested, and sometimes even amused him. For 
it is one of the paradoxical tendencies of a 
strong nature to smile now and then, with 
humorous satisfaction, at the very fierceness 
or violence of the relentless, onsetting force 
which threatens destruction. 

There had been times during those two 
years of struggle when it seemed to Cal¬ 
houn that he was rapidly becoming entire 
master of the situation. He would succeed 
for two or three weeks often, sometimes 
for a month or even two months, in abstain¬ 
ing entirely, the desire for alcohol appear¬ 
ing to grow less and less; and his courage 
and confidence would rise accordingly. And 
then the overpowering craving would rush 
upon him, wave after wave, like the beat¬ 
ing of mountainous billows upon a founder- 




158 


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ing ship; and it would appear for a time that 
all was lost—that the hideous maw, which 
is never filled by the millions of inebriate 
souls it devours, was disposing of one more 
insignificant victim. And so the unequal 
contest went on. It was still on, when, with 
that first column of infantry, going forth 
from their bungalow trenches to ultimate 
victory, he went over the top as the first 
morning rays of the September sun began 
to touch the sterility of that war-wasted 
field. 

An unusually long period of comparative 
respite for him had preceded that morning. 
He feared the probable sequel, so often en¬ 
countered; but his determination was un¬ 
shaken, and his confidence revived. His 
hope ran high. With agility and buoyancy 
he stepped in the van to do to the uttermost 
his share of the frightful work before those 
advancing columns. 

Those columns, one after the other in as 
regular formation as the conditions would 
permit, advanced over miles of extraordi¬ 
narily difficult ground covered with trench¬ 
es, concrete dugouts and deeply wired bar- 




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159 


riers. It would be very difficult for one who 
had not looked upon the scene to imagine 
the quantity of barbed wire that had been 
used by the Germans, and the burrowing 
that they had done on these hills, valleys and 
swamps, in four years. The advancing 
French were soon cutting their way through 
wire enough to encircle the globe. This was 
sufficiently formidable always, but particu¬ 
larly so when found woven endlessly among 
trees and underbrush, as was frequently 
the case. Trenches and excavations of 
every description, from simple holes and 
ditches to palatial, bomb-proof dugouts with 
elegant equipment and electric lights, were 
being taken and crossed and cleared, often 
at terrific toll of life of the lingering foe 
who dared to remain and fight to the death. 
With similar penalties, machine-gun nests 
were being met and cleared away, while the 
roar of such guns and the thunder of artil¬ 
lery farther off, carrying deadly gases and 
endless missiles, were heard through the bar¬ 
rage which was screening the steady ad¬ 
vance. Above it all, the French birdmen 




160 


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were more than holding their own against 
the enemy's best-trained flyers. 

The arrival of the French on the banks of 
the Py, on the west side of the Argonne, 
brought the culmination of the first phase 
of their attack. Calhoun, ardently pushing 
onward, with his friend Jack Crosby usual¬ 
ly not far away and frequently under the 
eye of Pierre Boze' who was now command¬ 
ing a company of Gouraud's best infantry, 
had been repeatedly emphasizing his prow¬ 
ess, by leading daring onslaughts on the des¬ 
perate, hidden foe. Again and again his 
comrades had tried in vain to call him back 
from points of special danger. He was vali¬ 
antly, almost recklessly, carrying out his de¬ 
termination to die in the van of the fight, 
rather than as a miserable victim of his own 
inveterate foe. 

There came a climax to his daring ex¬ 
ploits. Many of the enemy's haughty of¬ 
ficers were men of extravagant tastes, and 
evidently did not lack abundant means for 
their gratification. During the months and 
years of the German holding of the positions 
from which they were now being steadily 




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driven, these men had built and furnished 
living quarters which were luxurious almost 
beyond belief. Concrete chalets, some of 
them two or three stories above the ground 
and all with deep, bomb-proof subsurface 
portions, having ornate windows and trim¬ 
mings and well-painted exteriors, were not 
infrequently met as the advance proceeded. 
Within these were sleeping-quarters, lock¬ 
ers, bathrooms, dining rooms and “dens,” 
fitted up with every comfort and many lux¬ 
uries. Billiard tables, oriental rugs and 
tapestries, delicate vases of great value, and 
even “old masters” were occasionally found 
in those well appointed apartments. 

One of those structures, found when ulti¬ 
mately taken to be palatial in its furnishings 
and appointments, was approached late in 
the afternoon by the squad or group in 
which were Crosby and Calhoun. Its upper 
stories had been badly battered by shells and 
machine-gun missiles; but it was evidently 
the rendezvous of Boches, who intended 
to reap a full quid pro quo for the lives 
that they would have to yield. A machine 
gun, skilfully concealed, was also rendering 




162 


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effective aid in its defense. The men around 
Calhoun, valiant but careful, were firing at 
every living target about this elegant re¬ 
treat, and watching for a favorable oppor¬ 
tunity to rush upon it en masse . But he, 
in spite of calls and commands to return, 
worked his way in advance steadily toward 
it, firing as he went, and partially hiding 
as best he could behind every favoring tree, 
stump or rock. His comrades felt that they 
were watching a miracle, as they saw him 
go steadily on in spite of the continuous 
shower of bullets around him. He did not 
fall, though it seemed, second by second, 
that he must do so. But his intrepidity soon 
proved to be the keystone of the attack. 
Largely concentrating their attention upon 
him, the defenders of the place were less 
careful of one of the angles, and there was 
an instant when no one was ready to fire 
from that quarter. Thus came the infini¬ 
tesimal opportunity. The rush of the 
French was like lightning. Bayonets flash¬ 
ed and were dyed with German blood. At 
every opening and possible avenue of access, 
the hand-to-hand fighting went on, till the 






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attacking force had become the occupants of 
those sumptuous quarters, now surrounded 
by heaps of friends and foes passed beyond 
strife into the lists of the dead or the roll 
of the badly wounded. 

Darkness was coming on, and the com¬ 
mand to halt for the night was soon given. 
It was then that the tired victors began to 
examine this splendid “home,” which they 
had acquired at such awful cost, and which 
was one unit of those mighty works deemed 
impregnable by their architects and build¬ 
ers. The inspection, as it progressed, caused 
frequent and increasing exclamations of 
amazement at the conveniences, comforts 
and luxuries that were revealed. 

Calhoun, who had been slightly wounded 
but was able to take part in the unfolding 
of the marvels of the dugout-chalet, came 
after a time, with a few others who had got¬ 
ten down into the lowest cellar, to a thick 
oaken door, fastened with a heavy padlock, 
which yielded an opening only after much 
hard pounding with axes and heavy stones. 
The key to that subborn barrier was doubt¬ 
less in the pocket of one of those splendid 




164 


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dark green uniforms, soon to be respectfully 
laid in a trench even then being dug for 
Huns and Allies alike. When the door swung 
open at last, the contents of an unusually 
well-stocked wine and liquor cellar of Prus¬ 
sian connoisseurs were spread before those 
tired, hungry and thirsty soldiers. They 
helped themselves, of course, many sparing¬ 
ly and with discretion; but a few, among 
whom, alas! was Calhoun, without stint. 

Another fall. Yes; but on the morrow, 
even while the effects were still poignant, 
a more desperate resolve to end the unequal 
struggle on the point of German bayonets, 
or as the result of their gas or missiles. 

The day’s onrush to further success for 
the Allies quickly matched the challenge to 
the deadly determination. A machine-gun 
nest, the most stubborn and prolific yet en¬ 
countered, must be put out of existence, to¬ 
gether with all its Hunnish cunning. A 
lone adventurer rushes in advance to the at¬ 
tack. The shout of the commander, fol¬ 
lowed by a chorus of friends, commands— 
“William Calhoun, stop.” As well might 
they have called to the lightning to flash no 





It was too late to save the hero of the hou? 






Betliesda 


165 


more. In a moment the attack on all sides 
became general; but it was too late to save 
the hero of the hour. When they carried 
him tenderly to the rear, his feeble breath 
still telling faintly of the previous night's 
excess, and left a guard to watch him wrap¬ 
ped in wet blankets and laid in a dugout till 
an ambulance from the nearest hospital 
could arrive, they had little hope that the 
conveyance would come in time, or that the 
watch would be long required. 




CHAPTER X 


RECOVERY 

The mental products, conscious or subcon¬ 
scious, of a wounded brain are not neces¬ 
sarily “such stuff as dreams are made of.” 
It is at least conceivable that lesion of some 
part of the cerebral substance, or pressure 
upon it may augment the power of the mind 
in one or more directions. Men sometimes 
utter strangely significant words when, be¬ 
cause of injury or suffering, they are par¬ 
tially or even wholly unconscious of what 
they are saying. 

There came a few moments, in that crowd¬ 
ed, busy hospital near Paris, when some¬ 
thing like this appeared to occur in the life, 
hanging by the slenderest of threads, of 
one of its desperately wounded patients. In 
the last of a long row of cots, near a western 
window, he had lain like a corpse for three 


166 



Bethesda 


167 


days, scarcely breathing, and threatening to 
frustrate at any instant the skill of the best 
surgeons the world had ever known. They 
had operated on his head, the second time, 
that afternoon; and a patient little black- 
eyed nurse was watching him with anxious 
care at midnight. His lips moved slightly. 
His eyelids quivered a little as if he would 
look up, and then closed again. The index 
finger of one white hand, which lay on the 
counterpane, moved slowly as though to 
point in harmony with a thought. She bent 
her ear close to his lips, and heard him say 
faintly and laboriously, as if he were draw¬ 
ing up each word from some mighty depth: 

“Oh! There is the blessed shore. I may 
reach it yet. 0, my breath, hold out while 
I wrestle with this terribly troubled water. 
I could always swim like a duck; but now!— 
Is old Neptune pulling me? * * * How the 
wind roars. * * * That mighty billow seem¬ 
ed to break and tumble over my head. * * * 
Was it a stone that my right foot just touch¬ 
ed—or one of the prongs of his trident? 
There! I touched it again—with both feet. 
Thank God. The solid earth—my beloved 




168 


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native land, God’s glorious country, I am 
back—from that frightful storm and ship¬ 
wreck—back, almost naked, of body and of 
soul, a mere apology for my former self, to 
fight on—yea I will fight on here—against 
the diabolical monster that has eaten away 
my vitality.” 

He was still for a time; and the tense, 
drawn expression of his countenance was 
gradually replaced by the dawn of a smile. 
Then his lips, scarcely moving, framed other 
words:— 

“Whence did she come? She is standing 
over there, aloof, in her immaculate bright¬ 
ness; yet she is looking intently at me. Is 
it sorrow or pity, reproach or command that 
I observe on her beautiful countenance? If 
it is a command, must I obey? Is it too late? 
Listen. No other voice was ever half so 
sweet. She is speaking of a mighty 
advance, by this fair land of the free, 
in the march of human destiny. Is it 
too late for me? The change, she says, 
is yet in the making. The waters are 
still troubled. The perfect cure will re¬ 
quire much time. But that mighty leader of 




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169 


nations is stepping first into the pool; the 
process of ultimate recovery is inevitable, 
and the result is sure. The United States 
of America is preparing to lead the world 
in throwing off the age-long withering curse 
of intemperance. But, alas, my fair one, 
it may come too late for me—too late, too 
late, for poor old Billy Calhoun.” 

It was broad daylight when he next spoke. 
His only word, laboriously uttered, was 
“What?” He was wrestling with tempo¬ 
rary consciousness, for the first time since 
he had hurtled into that stream of mur¬ 
derous bullets. The nurse responded, quiet¬ 
ly singing our little leader’s solo. “Now 
lie very still and do not talk.” He half want¬ 
ed to speak again, to ask questions, to see 
if he was really alive, and to find out some 
things about others. Where were they? 
Had the Allies reached Berlin ? Whose voice 
was it? But for a little time he obeyed her 
command, like a child listening to its 
mother. Soon it seemed to him another 
form was standing near; and then another. 
The sounds became blurred, and vanishing. 
He tried to bring himself back, and succeed- 





170 


Bethesda 


ed in moving his lips a little; but there was 
no sound. Then with a great effort that 
strained his feeble will power, he compelled 
them to say, “Wine.” 

The sound of voices returned. The nurse 
was saying:—“Can he have a spoonful or 
two of water, Dr. Kenneth? His mouth 
seems parched.” 

“Not yet,” answered a bass voice. “Swab 
his mouth well with glycerine and lemon; 
and after an hour give him a spoonful of 
wine if he asks for it again. But be very, 
very sparing, even of liquids for the next 
twelve hours.” 

“Will he recover Doctor?” said a subdued, 
sweet voice of another woman. He thought 
confusedly that it sounded strangely fa¬ 
miliar. So possibly did the voice of the black- 
eyed nurse. 

“We may hope so, was the safe, profes¬ 
sional answer. Give to Mademoiselle 
Boze’ here all the counsel and assistance 
you can spare; for this is a very delicate 
case. We must save his mind, as well as his 
body.” 

He wondered whether it was one or more 




Bethesda 


171 


days thereafter when consciousness came 
again, this time more completely. The black- 
eyed nurse was by his bedside. “You are 
better,” she said with a bright smile. “You 
have had a long, natural sleep. You feel 
a little like yourself now, do you not?” 

He answered that he did. He wanted to 
turn his head and look directly at her, but he 
could not do so because it was so tightly 
swathed and bandaged. But he blurted 
out:— “They call you Mademoiselle Boze’, 
do they not. Are you Marie Boze’, who 
helped to get me into the war?” 

“Guilty,” she said. “But you have talked 
enough now. I am so glad you are better.” 

“Have our forces reached Berlin?” he 
inquired. 

“Not yet,” she said, smiling proudly, “but 
they are going there. Everything is pro¬ 
gressing splendidly. Now you must keep 
quiet. Listen. Our musical nurses serenade 
you good, wounded boys at least once a day. 
And our dear little Miss Overton, the gift¬ 
ed head and manager of this ward, supplies 
the most beautiful charm of it all. She is 
an angel.” 




172 


Betliesda 


Adown the long corridor came the chorus, 
soothing his newly-awakened consciousness, 
calming every nerve and stilling for the time 
his desire to ask more questions. He sped 
away, three thousand miles—home, peace, 
mother. He closed his eyes, and she was 
very near, and he was a boy again, and the 
dreadful experiences were in oblivion. But, 
No! it was not her voice; and yet one en¬ 
trancing, well-remembered and never to be 
forgotten. She sang with a gentle, pene¬ 
trating pathos:— 

“Before the hills in order stood, 

Or earth received her frame, 

From everlasting thou art God, 

To endless years the same. 

A thousand ages, in thy sight, 

Are like an evening gone; 

Short as the watch that ends the night, 
Before the rising sun.” 

“Will she come in and speak to me,” he 
asked; and then foolishly, in his weakness, 
found himself wishing that he had 
not spoken. His eyes closed in an 
ecstacy of repose and contentment. And 
then that voice, close to him, was saying:— 




Bethesda 


173 


“Well, how is our hero patient this morn¬ 
ing? Quite improved, I should judge from 
his looks.” 

He wanted to add some fine remark to the 
nurse’s hearty assurance that he was doing 
very well. But somehow the thoughts would 
not come. Was this a reality, or still a vivid 
dream? He caught himself trying to see 
if she was lifting a white, flying creature 
from her shoulder. And then the best de¬ 
termination he could form pushed up into 
his consciousness, and he said weakly:— 
“Thank you—both of you. I ought to have 
said that to you long ago, but somehow I 
did not have the gumption. This is jolly, 
isn’t it? Are you Miss Overton?” And 
then he realized that he had asked a useless 
question, when he wanted so badly to ask 
something different. 

“Yes,” she said, “Mr. Calhoun; and I am 
very glad you are promising so nicely to get 
well. I will come quite often to watch your 
progress, under the splendid care of our 
good friend Mademoiselle Bose’. Now you 
must shut your eyes and rest.” 

Then he blurted out another request, 





174 


Betliesda 


which he had not intended:—“May I not 
have something a little strong to drink?” 

The two women looked at each other and 
there came into the eyes of Ruth Overton a 
look of intense resolve and determination, 
which might eventuate sometime in very 
decisive action. She had learned from 
Marie Boze , the pathetic life story of their 
patient, soon after he had been brought 
into the hospital. She said, with gentle 
kindness:—“Yes, a very little. But, my 
good friend, you will practice obedience and 
docility for your own benefit while you are 
here with us, won’t you?” 

His eyes partly closed. He lay quiet, 
scarcely breathing, for a few seconds, and 
then said, languidly:— 

“I suppose so, my fair one; but perhaps 
it is too late.” 

He was asleep, and the watchers found 
themselves vaguely endeavoring to fathom 
the unconscious working of a desperately 
troubled mind. 

The next day he seemed to remember and 
think more clearly. His head was slightly 
turned now, and he could see Miss Boze’ 




Bethesda 


175 


better as she moved about her tender minis¬ 
trations. “Where is Jack Crosby?” was the 
first question. 

“They say he was almost as recklessly 
brave as yourself,” she answered sadly. 
“And—and the Boches got him, I suppose— 
as I hoped they would get me,” he said 
wearily. 

“He has gone to his reward,” she answered 
after a pause; “but we hope and believe that 
you were remanded here for a useful life. 
Your other good friend, Dr. Philip Ross, 
is still with us, and was over here in consul¬ 
tation about you two days ago.” 

“No finer man has been in the service,” 
he exclaimed enthusiastically. 

“True,” she said in a low firm tone; and 
as she turned around and moved a tray on 
the table, he found himself wondering a 
little why that thing had to be shifted just 
then. “You had better not talk much more 
now,” she continued, with her back still to¬ 
ward him. 

“Then please tell me about the ‘sweet 
singer’ of this ward,” he said as lightly as he 
could. “Is she English or American, and 




176 


Bethesda 


how did she come to be here with all you 
French ladies? And, by the way, am I not 
entitled to a taste of wine?” 

She poured a very little claret into a spoon 
and held it to his lips. His eyes thanked her 
as he swallowed; and he remembered after¬ 
ward that they vaguely noticed a slight, un¬ 
wonted flush in her cheeks. 

“Lie perfectly quiet and listen,” she said, 
smiling; “and perhaps I may talk you to 
sleep in telling what little I know about her.” 

“She is an American, the daughter of a 
well-to-do lawyer, they say. With her 
father and mother, she was traveling in 
Switzerland when the war began. She tells 
of a remarkable sermon, which they heard 
in Lucerne on that fateful Sunday, the sec¬ 
ond day of August, 1914, and how it hasten¬ 
ed forward her desire, which undoubtedly 
would have come sooner or later anyhow, 
to take the best part she could in the great 
struggle. It seems that the good old Scotch 
Divine who preached almost dared to pro¬ 
phesy that, out of this terrific conflict—this 
mighty moving of the waters of the world— 
would come for some nation or nations an 




Bethesda 


177 


unexpected cure, a glorious healing of a 
direful malady. She believes that that boon 
is for your country, and that it is to be the 
emancipation, of your countrymen at least, 
from the curse of alcohol.’' 

Had the speaker looked then at her pa¬ 
tient, she would have seen that she was very 
far from talking him to sleep. His thoughts 
had flown back nineteen centuries, to a scene 
near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem; at that 
point he was endeavoring to focus the des¬ 
tiny of men; and automatically, but with 
no conscious selfishness, he was asking, 
could it possibly include such a wreck as 
William Calhoun? 

She knew enough of his life not to em¬ 
barrass him then by a look or a gesture. If 
she had known all she might have stopped 
there. But love of the object of her dis¬ 
course and desire to respond more fully to 
his question caused her, in ignorance of his 
more intimate knowledge of what she had 
mentioned, to proceed with her narrative. 

“When Miss Overton heard that dis¬ 
course, she was only eighteen years old. But 
she already held a New York diploma as a 




178 


Bethesda 


trained nurse; and she had, stowed away 
in her young, vigorous mind, an ineradicable 
determination to make her life of the great¬ 
est possible benefit to her fellow beings. She 
had and has also another characteristic, 
which is unique, and to some of our nurses, 
though not to me I am glad to say, it even 
appears somewhat uncanny. I have no 
English words to describe it fully; but for 
want of a better phrase, I may call it the 
unusual wisdom of her 'persistent childish¬ 
ness. Let me try to explain. 

“Ruth Overton will never grow old, in 
any true sense; she will not permit her¬ 
self to do so. The Divine sweetness, which 
was born with her pure soul, receives con¬ 
stant, vernal invigoration in her life and is 
never sered. She looks back always to the 
fountain and draws from it; and she never 
troubles herself about any abyss ahead. The 
future will take care of itself. She will be 
more beautiful, and in a very true sense 
younger, at sixty than she was at eighteen. 
She grows as a product of the love of the 
the Son of God. Her nature, therefore, re¬ 
mains in harmony with all that is best in all 





Bethesda 


179 


that God has made. How I wish I could 
formulate a better description, for she has 
sealed me effectually as one of her devotees. 
There are only a few such beings in the 
world. They bless it far, far more than their 
best friends or they themselves can 
imagine.” 

“One outcropping of her nature is that 
everybody and everything, in which there 
is any good—and I am not sure that any 
part of the universe of sentient beings is 
thus omitted—love her, and want to obey 
her. Why, the strange collies and St. Ber¬ 
nards run up and try to lick her hand, as she 
walks along the street. A horse will leave 
his provender, and, look up and neigh a 
greeting as she passes. The birds fly to her 
as their friend. She belongs to them all. 
And as for men and women, they instinctive¬ 
ly take her to their hearts and accord her the 
right to command. They say she sings 
beautifully—and they are right. You seem¬ 
ed to enjoy her solos even when you were 
only half conscious and were calling for al¬ 
cohol. Methinks the real attraction is in 
her lovely young soul, growing younger and 




180 


Bethesda 


more vigorously lovely as the years advance, 
rising in her voice and words, beautiful as 
the glories of the universe from which she 
came and to which, with the innocence of 
childish happiness, she constantly reverts.” 

He murmured:—“Except ye receive the 
kingdom of heaven as a little child, ye shall 
in no wise enter therein.” 

“Perhaps that expresses it,” she said. “I 
hope I have made my feeble conception of 
her clear. She went back to America with 
her parents, in the fall of 1914, and remain¬ 
ed there for several months. She was help¬ 
ing her good mother—a sweet, delicate, fit¬ 
ting parent of such a daughter—to counsel 
and cheer a dear friend of their family, a 
Mrs. Gilbert Oliver, whose husband was 
rapidly becoming a hopeless inebriate. He 
finally shot and killed himself, in a fit of 
drunken despondency, and left his widow 
to bear the burdens which rum had made 
him too cowardly to endure.” 

“Our little leader came back, to France, 
in the latter part of 1915, and was assigned 
to a humble position as nurse in the hospi¬ 
tal at Boulogne. She was soon managing 




Bethesda 


181 


an important department there. Without 
any effort on her part, manifestly without 
any desire of hers except that the result 
might increase her usefulness, her unique 
ability became known to the leading military 
surgeons and physicians, both French and 
American; with the result that she has been 
called successively to a number of the places 
where special skill, endurance and faithful¬ 
ness have been required of the nursing 
force. She has been here for about six 
weeks, bestowing her special care on cases, 
such as yours was for many hours, where 
life and death have been hanging in the 
balance.” 

“Now, Mr. Calhoun, I am afraid I may 
have talked to you too much. You got me 
started on a very attractive theme. I have 
used the best English I know. And you have 
been a very attentive and quite a compli¬ 
mentary listener. Now you must rest and 
sleep.” 

For once at least he was boyishly obedi¬ 
ent. The drowsiness which intense earnest¬ 
ness, bordering on excitement, brings to a 
weakened system was upon him. He re- 




182 


Betliesda 


laxed, like a tired child, and said, only half 
consciously:—“All right, my dear;” and all 
was forgotten in profound sleep. 

She smiled indulgently, and turned away. 
She had an indistinct impression that per¬ 
haps the half had not been told, and that 
possibly her interesting patient had made 
some discoveries which she had not intend¬ 
ed. 

It was nearly a week later when he said 
to her, suddenly and perhaps a little petu¬ 
lantly, one morning:—“What has become of 
our little leader? I have heard her sing, 
in the far away; but she has not been here 
for two or three days. Why do you not have 
her around here more often?” 

“Oh! you are getting well, Mr. Calhoun,” 
she replied. “Miss Overton has to stay most 
of her time on the firing line, so to speak, 
where the dread harvester is the busiest. He 
did not get you this time, thanks very large¬ 
ly to her watchfulness and skill.” 

“Is that so,” he responded dryly. “Well, 
could you not arrange to have the old black 
visitor skulking around here a little once 
more, and frighten her back?” 





Bethesda 


183 


She laughed merrily; and said:—“Well 
now, as a matter of fact she expects to come 
to see you, for a little while, this afternoon. 
You see, she has been in this hospital quite 
a long time—longer perhaps than we have 
deserved of such talents—and she may be 
called away before long. We are getting 
much better than we were two months ago. 
Your good friend, Dr. Ross, was remarking 
the other day that Miss Overton might soon 
be called to his hospital near Verdun.” 

A mischievous twinkle came into his eyes 
as he said:—“Won’t you please ask Dr. 
Ross to come oftener to see me." 

She held her ground this time, though 
the color in her pretty face deepened per¬ 
ceptibly. 

“Yes, I surely will,” she said demurely. 
“But as for our ‘Little Leader’ ”—and now 
the merry banter was being transferred to 
her—“let me suggest to you that she is a 
very important lady in France. We may find 
it expedient to keep her. She has 
been wounded twice on our soil, and 
is better known at the front than 
many of our prominent surgeons.” She 




184 


Bethesda 


paused, looked fixedly at him for a mo¬ 
ment and then continued. “Will you 
let me add this, a little more seriously, Mr. 
Calhoun. She is heart and soul in sympathy 
with that semi-prophecy, which I have told 
you she heard uttered at Lucerne four years 
ago. Your great and good country is evinc¬ 
ing a magnificent tendency to fulfill that 
prophecy. If she goes back to America, it 
will be to devote her every energy to help 
on the accomplishment of such a splendid 
result. Have you ever thought of the part 
which you might play in that same splendid 
advancement of your country and race?” 

He lay ominously quiet for a few seconds; 
and his countenance gradually assumed an 
expression that caused her to feel cold 
and numb, and to think of how the face of 
a poor victim must look as it is being thrust 
down upon the guillotine. Then he spoke, 
very slowly and deliberately. 

“I heard that same sermon, at Lucerne. 
I did not know until you told me that she 
heard it also. I cannot help regarding it as 
the utterance of a prophecy, a marvelous 
prediction of the inestimable blessing which 




Bethesda 


185 


is coming to my beloved country. But alas, 
alas, alas, Mademoiselle Boze’, it will come 
too late for me. God only knows how I have 
struggled since hearing that noble dis¬ 
course to throw off the shackles. You know 
my life story pretty well. The demon that 
has me will not loose his hold. When I first 
came back to consciousness under your de¬ 
voted care, it seemed for a short time as if 
his grip might be weakening. But as 
strength has returned to me, his sinister 
power has been increasingly enforced. The 
very mention of rum augments it, and the 
frequency of the attacks of maddening de¬ 
sire is growing. They evidently will, ere 
long, become almost continuous. Even now, 
every fibre of my being is craving for alco¬ 
hol, with a fierceness that will drive me mad 
if the demand is not supplied. The little 
that you have given me has ceased utter¬ 
ly to satisfy. I must have it in abundance, 
and I am planning to beseech her this after¬ 
noon to aid me. I know what it all means 
better than you possibly can know or guess 
—loss, incalculable loss—ruin—death—hell. 
But it is too late—too late!” 





186 


Bethesda 


Her face was wet with tears, and she 
moaned piteously. 

“No! No! No! Mr. Calhoun, No! You 
can and must win the fight. You are young, 
and strong, and brave—oh! so brave! Take 
courage, and with your Heavenly Father’s 
help fight on and win. Seek also her coun¬ 
sel and aid, this afternoon, not to yield to the 
monster, but to win the fight against him.” 

The only response was a suppressed 
groan. And as he turned away his face and 
closed his eyes to try to sleep, she caught the 
faint refrain—“too late! too late!” 

When she felt sure that his agony had 
yielded temporarily to a troubled sleep, she 
went to find Ruth Overton. 




CHAPTER XI 


DESPAIR 

“Lethe! let me drink. Better oblivion 
than purgatory.” 

The words sobbed themselves forth spas¬ 
modically from the semi-conscious depths of 
an unutterable woe. He was forcing his 
eyelids to close tightly, and endeavoring to 
escape the ordeal of awakening; he fear¬ 
ed that he was coming back to the agony 
with which the black-eyed nurse had ob¬ 
served him struggle four or five hours be¬ 
fore. He was unaware of the flight of those 
hours. The rays of the afternoon sun, 
streaming through his window, had not yet 
told him of their passing. “Do not let her 
come here this afternoon, to see a wretch 
like me,” he murmured, after struggling for 
a moment or two against his unwelcome 


187 



188 


Bethesda 




awakening. “I am rapidly becoming unfit 
for her even to think of.” 

“Whom do you wish me to keep away,” 
queried the calm voice of Ruth Overton, 
with just a suggestion of amusement in its 
tone. 

His eyes opened wide, and looked at her, 
sitting by his bed, her cheeks tinged with a 
delicate flush, which was heightened per¬ 
haps by the brilliancy of the sunshine flood¬ 
ing the room. His woe began to subside. 

“Won’t you please take that red affair 
away from your breast,” he sighed slowly. 
“Your attire is pure white.” 

“Why!” she expostulated; “Would you 
have me put aside even the red cross in this 
land of carnage?” 

“Well!” he replied, “let us compromise. 
Cover it over with that pretty kerchief in 
your hand; and, now that you are here, talk 
to me for a while. It is afternoon, isn’t it; 
and I have been asleep for a long time. I 
thought I had just dozed off a few minutes, 
and that it was my pretty little French 
nurse still sitting there. Thank you awfully 




Bethesda 


189 


for coming—and you will cover up that red¬ 
ness, won’t you?” 

She deftly hid the offending color as re¬ 
quested, and pouting her lips as if offended, 
said:—“Oh! it is I, is it, whom you did not 
wish to see here this afternoon. Well, I can 
soon go away, after I am professionally as¬ 
sured that you are doing well.” 

“Don’t go away, please,” he exclaimed. 
“You will soon see that I am not really doing 
well, and that it is because of my horrible 
condition that I would not have you called. 
I am not fit to see you. Like a miserable, 
repulsive beast, I have been lying here hop¬ 
ing that you could be persuaded to let me 
have alcohol, in abundance; and, now that 
you are here, I am going to be callous 
enough to make that request. For, oh! 
Miss Overton, as my physical strength re¬ 
turns, the violence of my craving grows at 
an ever increasing rate; and at times it 
seems that I must die if it is not gratified. 
Would that I could die now, and go to hades, 
and so have this horrible struggle ended. 
May I have the strong drink?” 

“No!” she said faintly, after a long pause, 




190 


Bethesda 


as she brushed a tear from her cheek. “It 
is my duty to answer you thus. Won't you 
help little me to perform my duty?" 

He realized that his answer to her nat¬ 
ural little question must be the climax of his 
terrific ordeal. He longed, even more than 
he could realize, to say to her that he would 
be man enough to aid her by forcing himself 
to abstain from the use of alcohol alto¬ 
gether. A faint realization of what he 
might possibly hope for himself and her, if 
that were possible, made him dazed and 
faint. But gradually the hard, desperate 
look came back into his face; and as calmly 
and gently as he could force himself to 
speak, he said:— 

“Why should you regard that as your 
duty? It does no real good to any one. 
I am past all availing effort and beyond all 
hope. It is too late for me. No one can cope 
successfully with me or for me against the 
hellish appetite that is forcing me down— 
just as it has forced down so many millions 
of men and women in all the ages. Please 
give me alcohol. You know my history, do 
you not?" 




Bethesda 


191 


“Yes,” she said, “I know; and, Mr. Cal¬ 
houn, I know that you can throw off this 
thraldom. You can rise up, in your young, 
vigorous manhood and vanquish this vicious 
despoiler of our race; and I believe you will 
do so. At any rate it is my very plain duty 
to help, nay to compel you, as far as in me 
lies, to endeavor to do so; and I am going to 
perform that duty to the limit.” 

His quick glance at her set little face, 
made beatifically beautiful by the high re¬ 
solve written so plainly there, convinced him 
of the utter futility of any further request 
or expostulation. So he answered, rather 
weakly and awkwardly, “Would to God I 
could; but it is too late.” 

A long silence ensued. She looked at him 
piteously for awhile, and then away toward 
the autumn sun declining in the west; and 
her little hands were clasped tightly as if 
in prayer for strength to win against this 
man’s inveterate and apparently uncon¬ 
querable foe. Then she spoke, slowly and 
very deliberately. 

“Mr. Calhoun, it is not too late. It is never 
too late. There are at least two adequate 




192 


Bethesda 


reasons why it is not too late for you. Let 
me try to state them briefly. But first I am 
going to disclaim every attempt to use or 
appeal to any particular creed, dogma, or 
form of religion in my feeble argument. I 
am a Presbyterian, and I have been inform¬ 
ed by our good friend Dr. Ross that you 
belong to that Church. Both of us listened 
to that inspired sermon on Bethesda at 
Lucerne, as the war was breaking out. Thus 
there are common grounds on which I could 
very well ask you to stand with me. But 
I am going to try to look and go a little 
deeper, or at least in a different direction.” 

“So you also heard that sermon, did you,” 
he exclaimed. “We did not see you there, 
perhaps because we had to hurry away be¬ 
fore the service ended. Well, I can make 
the score even by telling you that I looked 
on you in admiration when you were not 
aware of me—even before we sang that lit¬ 
tle duet on the lagoon at Venice.” 

“Where?” she asked. 

“Do you remember the white pigeon, 
that alighted on your shoulder that after¬ 
noon in Venice, as you stood near the base 





Bethesda 


193 


of the Campanile, with all the other pigeons 
trying to get close to you? I sat by a table 
at Florians, and saw it fly from the roof of 
the Palace of the Doges and choose out you, 
from all the rest of the world, as its resting 
place. I wanted to follow you, when you 
took a fine old gentleman’s arm and followed 
the pigeon; but alas! the same old, hateful 
story—I was too busy with a glass of wine.” 

She smiled, even while she sighed slightly; 
and the color crept into her face. 

“That was a sweetly curious little crea¬ 
ture,” she said; “and it pleased me very 
much by flying away in the direction 
I indicated. It always makes me so glad to 
see that the birds and dogs and lambs and 
wild creatures are not afraid of me and ap¬ 
pear to love me.” 

“And, Mr. Calhoun,” she added gravely, 
looking longingly at him, “it is probably in 
the sphere thus entered, of thought, or spec¬ 
ulation, or reasoning, whichever you choose 
to call it, that I find the first of those two 
reasons why it is not too late for you to 
escape from the domination of strong drink. 
You are young, and strong, and brave. 






194 


Bethesda 


There is a soul within you, which can gather 
up, or back , the indomitable force brought 
with it into this sphere of existence, and 
which can, and must , cope successfully with 
your besetting evil. Revive and reinstate 
the forces that have been yours, or should 
have been yours from childhood. Be a boy 
again in dauntless grasp of life and 
hope; add to that status the power which 
has come with manhood; look up to the 
source of it all; stand in the combined force 
and strength that will thus be yours, and 
you will win. Mr. Calhoun, you must win.” 

He looked at her curiously, but with the 
agony still depicted on his face. “You re¬ 
mind me,” he said, “of a query in that quaint 
poem of Samuel Waddington’s ‘Soul and 
Body/ which my boyhood memory retains— 
‘Where wert thou, Soul, ere yet my body born 
Became thy dwelling-place? 

Didst thou on earth, 

Or in the clouds, await this body’s birth ? 

Or by what chance upon that winter’s morn 
Didst thou this body find, a babe forlorn?’ ” 

She answered earnestly:—“It was with 
God, Mr. Calhoun, and came from His 




Bethesda 


195 


eternal universe of life. Wordsworth has 
tried to tell us, though I think with too 
much hesitation— 

‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 

And cometh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 

But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home: 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.’ ” 

“We can keep and use the heritage that 
thus is ours; we can retain, as life and 
strength advance and years roll on, the in¬ 
domitableness of the spirit within us; we 
can live, as do His other creatures, and then 
they will all love us; and thus we can rise 
superior even to such a fiendish evil as be¬ 
sets your life. My friend, go back to na¬ 
ture, to the natural strength which your 
soul brought with it whence it came and 
which should increase with your life’s prog¬ 
ress. Sing with the same gracious poet, 
as you look out on God’s fair world and upon 
His creatures which go unswervingly for¬ 
ward in their appointed spheres— 





196 


Bethesda 


‘Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call 
Ye to each other make; I see 
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; 

My heart is at your festival, 

My head hath its coronal, 

The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel 
it all. 

* * * 

The youth, who daily farther from the east 
Must travel, still is nature’s priest, 

And by the vision splendid, 

Is on his way attended.’ ” 

“You may always be so attended. You 
may go back, to revive and re-employ the in¬ 
vincible courage, the indomitable spirit 
that grew up with you as a lad. You can 
put away the intervening blight, the with¬ 
ering curse, and rise triumphant to the full 
height of your former self. It is not neces¬ 
sary that the man shall see the vision of his 
beautiful boyhood, ‘die away, and fade in¬ 
to the light of common day.’ Wordsworth, 
in his ecstacy for the boy, does not need to 
despair for the man, as in a sense he may 
seem to do; neither need he be apologetic of 
his dominant conception. In fact he never 




Bethesda 


197 


was so, nor did so; for in another single 
stanza he sings— 

‘My heart leaps up when I behold 
A rainbow in the sky: 

So was it when my life began; 

So is it now I am a man ; 

So be it when I shall grow old, 

Or let me die!’ ” 

“It may be and remain so with every one 
of us. It may be so with you. You must 
succeed. You shall succeed. Mr. Calhoun, 
you must and will overcome this most subtle 
enemy and seducer of manhood.” 

She paused, as if expecting him to speak. 
But he had covered his face with both 
hands; and he remained silent. After 
watching him in almost hopeless pity for a 
time, she continued:— 

“The other adequate reason why it is not 
too late for you to vanquish your terrible 
foe follows naturally that which I have men¬ 
tioned; and it appears to me practically 
conclusive. It is the fact that the way is 
being prepared for the coming of total pro¬ 
hibition of the use of alcohol as a beverage, 
in America; and the direct process of bring- 






198 


Bethesda 


ing about that result is already in opera¬ 
tion.” 

“My good friend, this war is not being 
fought in vain. God is not mocked by the 
wrath of men. The question is being asked, 
the world around, why, why this most hor¬ 
rible of all eras of carnage, this calamity ap¬ 
parently unprecedented in the annals of men 
or demons? Shades of John Dunlop and 
Frances Willard, prophets of the march of 
real human progress, answer, whatever re¬ 
sponses otherwise may ring true now or 
hereafter, that it is to put down forever the 
domination of strong drink over the lives of 
free men and women, at least in the 
United States of America. And, Mr. 
Calhoun, it seems clear that the con¬ 
summation of that blessing, truly Divine, is 
to come in time to afford you effectual aid 
in the heroic and successful struggle that 
you are going to make.” 

“To me, it is a real 'Bethesda,' a moving 
of world waters for a perfect cure; and I 
hope and believe that, in the profoundest 
depths of your being, it is the same to you. 
But, however that may be, think with me 




Bethesda 


199 


for a moment of what is taking place across 
the sea. Look! Reason!” 

“Few persons could tell a more interesting 
or instructive story, than could you, of the 
earnest, even laudable, yet ordinarily pa¬ 
thetic, or silly, or fanatical efforts of local 
reformers to enforce total prohibition in 
small areas over our beloved land. We may 
honor and revere the spirit which generally 
swayed those abortive efforts, so frequently 
vicious and ruinous in their consequences. 
Moreover, they must have had their com¬ 
bined result, ‘for the good of the cause,’ 
when the hour was struck for the inaugura¬ 
tion, nationally, of the great reform. I am 
not able, of course, to trace the growth of 
that ultimate movement, doubtless destined 
to be effectual, but I am the somewhat ob¬ 
servant daughter of a pretty careful lawyer, 
and can call your attention to some few of 
its features—events which, in my view, are 
as truly movings of Bethesdic waters as 
were those that occurred near the Sheep 
Gate at Jerusalem over nineteen hundred 
years ago.” 

“It was when the Federal Government be- 





200 


Bethesda 


gan to aid the States which were struggling 
for absolute prohibition within their own 
borders that the first note was struck in 
the glorious refrain, soon I am sure to be 
sung in its entirety. That note rang through 
the land when, over a quarter of a century 
ago, a wise Congress made intoxicating 
liquors imported into a State, in whatever 
form they went, at once subject to the 
operation and effect of that State's laws, to 
the same extent and in the same manner as 
though the liquor had been produced within 
that State. Thus was helped on, but slight¬ 
ly it is true yet certainly, the struggles of 
the individual States, whose number was 
gradually increasing, where the cause of 
temperance was being most valiantly es¬ 
poused. There were sneers then, of course, 
at those ‘small favors,' which were being 
‘thankfully received.' When a wiser Con¬ 
gress, twenty years later, prohibited the 
importation of such liquor into a State, to 
be used therein in violation of its local law, 
there were more banterings, but also more 
frightened remonstrances. And, only four 
years later, came the National mandate in- 




Betliesda 


201 


terdicting forever the transfer, in interstate 
commerce, of any intoxicating liquor, except 
for scientific, sacramental, medicinal, or 
mechanical purposes, into any State or Ter¬ 
ritory the laws of which prohibited its 
manufacture or sale therein for beverage 
purposes. The way was thus being pre¬ 
pared; a highway was being made straight; 
the rough places were becoming smooth/’ 
“And then came the troubling of the 
water, this mightiest of all conflicts. And, 
simultaneously with the stepping in of our 
great nation, was the submission to her 
people of the glorious Eighteenth Amend¬ 
ment to her Constitution. Mr. Calhoun, 
read it; study it, revere it. For it is so rap¬ 
idly receiving the endorsement of the States 
that it is practically sure to become a part 
of our fundamental law. It reads— 
“SECTION 1. After one year from the 
ratification of this article the manufacture, 
sale, or transportation of intoxicating liq¬ 
uors within, the transportation thereof into, 
or the exportation thereof from the United 
States and all territory subject to the juris- 




202 


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diction thereof for beverage purposes is 
hereby forbidden. 

“SECTION 2. The Congress and the sev¬ 
eral States shall have concurrent power to 
enforce this article by appropriate legisla- 
tion.” 

“My good but unfortunate friend,” she 
continued, “when you return to America, 
which I hope you will do as soon as you are 
able to go, utilize to the full the priceless 
assistance which these coming events are 
preparing to aid in your salvation. Join 
with the mighty forces arrayed against the 
evil, and fight, fight on till victory is yours. 
The innovation, the reform is for you; his¬ 
toric, irresistible forces are co-operating 
with you; the water is being troubled in 
order that you may step in and be cured. 
You can, you must, you will win.” 

She knew that the long silence that fol¬ 
lowed was ominous. His eyes were turned 
toward her; but she realized that they were 
looking beyond and away. She could not 
know of the desperate struggle that was 
being waged within him against his longing 
to tell her, then and there, that he could only 




Bethesda 


203 


hope to succeed in the contest if he could 
fight with her standing as his wife by his 
side. Neither could she guess at the loath¬ 
ing of himself, with which he was filled, 
when he realized the force of the temptation 
to speak thus to her. His venomous black¬ 
ness of despair could never dare to woo the 
immaculate whiteness of her purity, from 
the symbol of which he had recently urged 
away even the color of the Cross. No! No! 
He must add the frightful agony of that 
fact to his fiendish but for the present hope¬ 
less craving for alcohol, and must lie there, 
wounded, weak and but slowly convalescent, 
and endure in mute despair the loathsome, 
stupendous torture of it all. 0, rum, he 
thought, thou demon diabolical, could the 
fiendishness of all hells produce a worse foe 
to beset humanity. There comes a limit to 
such torture of a weakened system. The 
stare of his eye became slightly more va¬ 
cant but less appalling. He turned his gaze 
consciously upon her, in abject, piteous 
hopelessness, and said:— 

“Oh! if it might only be for me—or for 
you—what do I mean. I know—yes—alas— 





204 


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it is too late! Too late! Too 1-water 

please!” 

She gave him a few spoonfuls of water, 
even as his lids were closing over eyes glar¬ 
ing with horror, while his mouth was tight¬ 
ening in harmony with the convulsive work¬ 
ings of his features. Her hand rested on his 
forehead, and smoothed backward the wav¬ 
ing locks. 

The tears were coursing down her cheeks; 
and, assured that he was beyond the power 
of observation, she made no attempt to 
check them. Soon a more natural sleep was 
chasing away the paroxysm of despair; and 
the quiet and repose of his handsome face 
gradually returned, as she sat and watched 
him there. 

Half an hour later, when Mademoiselle 
Boze' came back and asked how it fared with 
their good young hero, the quiet watcher 
answered quite naturally but slowly:—“He 
is all right now, my dear. But hereafter we 
must refuse to give him anything at all that 
is intoxicating, or that has any narcotic 
effect,” 

“Why, do you think he is strong enough 




Bethesda 


205 


to endure that,” asked the indulgent nurse, 
solicitously. 

“Yes, I am sure he is,” was the deliberate 
answer. And then, quickly and firmly were 
added the words, “he must /” 

There was a pained, far-away look in 
Ruth Overton’s bright eyes, as she turned 
away and walked slowly down the aisle. A 
skilful searcher of minds might possibly 
have read, through and behind them, the 
half-conscious query—“Could I ever resem¬ 
ble Ariadne? But, no!” she thought, more 
clearly, “He is not Bacchus. He is just a 
good, noble, American boy, who has fallen 
into the slough of despond. Oh! he must be 
pulled out. He shall be pulled out.” 




CHAPTER XII 


SEPARATION 

A few days later and while November, 
1918, was yet a young month, Doctor 
Philip Ross was standing, with Marie Boze’, 
by Calhoun’s bed, and looking down anxious¬ 
ly upon him. “What is it, my boy,” he was 
saying. “Your excellent nurse tells me you 
are having a peck of trouble.” 

“Alcohol! alcohol!” moaned the patient. 
“I must have it in some form quickly, or I 
shall die. Its denial, I know, has been 
prompted by the best of purposes and inten¬ 
tions ; but the ordeal is too much. It is driv¬ 
ing me mad, to the devil; and his imps are 
already clutching at my vitals. Oh, look! 
hark! can you let them tear me? Oh, hell, 
my good old friend Phil, if you are still 
there; rum, rum—rescue me!” 

The strain was too great for the weak- 


206 



Bethesda 


207 


ened system; and unconsciousness soon 
came as a temporary relief. His body re¬ 
laxed; and a condition similar to natural 
sleep ensued. 

“How long has this trouble existed?” ask¬ 
ed Dr. Ross solicitously. 

“It has been growing upon him,” re¬ 
sponded the nurse, “for the last three days, 
since he has not had alcohol in any form. 
Before that, we gave him a little wine when 
he pleaded for it so piteously; but never, of 
course, as much as he demanded. Our little 
‘gifts,’ however, while far from satisfying 
him, did soothe him; and we thought he was 
doing quite well. Then Miss Overton, evi¬ 
dently after having consulted the doctors, 
directed us to cease letting him have any al¬ 
cohol at all. Since then his pleadings have 
been frequently heartrending, and he has 
been delirious several times. I suppose it is 
correct for me to speak of the attacks as 
delirium tremens, for he has been mildly 
wild enough, and has thought he was at¬ 
tacked by reptiles and demons.” 

“My dear,” he answered, looking at her 
fondly, "you know that you have here a very 




208 


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desperate case. As I look back over his 
hopelessly desperate struggles of the last 
four years and think of the frightful state 
to which he had come before he was wound¬ 
ed, I am tempted to wonder whether it 
would not have been better if the stroke 
that placed him in your tender care had 
been a little bit harder. Oh! the tyranny 
of rum; the unutterable tragedy of a life 
on which it fastens its loathsome grip! 
There may be more swiftly deadly foes of 
our race, but there are none that are more 
poignantly diabolical. It may be possible, 
while Calhoun is convalescent here—and we 
must make that period as long as we reason¬ 
ably can—to drive away his thirst, his aw¬ 
ful craving, sufficiently to enable him to 
cope with it and down it when he is entirely 
well. If so, now that he is strong enough 
to endure it—and we doctors have agreed 
that he is sufficiently recovered—it must be 
through our compelling his total abstinence. 
It may result in such fits as we have just 
witnessed. But they will gradually di¬ 
minish; and it is the only way. You cannot 
trifle with such a foe. So your pretty little 






Bethesda 


209 


leader was entirely right in the order which 
she issued. I have a very definite feeling 
that its issuance called for a heroic struggle 
on her part. But, young, fragile and pretty 
as she is, she has the nerve and determina¬ 
tion of a dauntless heroine.” 

As he uttered these words, he glanced fur¬ 
tively at the black-eyed beauty beside him, 
smiled a little and added quietly:— 

“She is pretty, isn’t she? But she is not 
so beautiful as his nurse, and she could not 
possibly be as sweet.” 

She blushed happily, and moved a little 
nearer to the bedside where he stood. Some 
word of joyous repartee was evidently 
struggling to her lips, when it was checked 
by the voice of the sufferer, coming back to 
consciousness. 

“0 Phil,” he was saying, “may I not have 
just one more good drink? Give me enough 
now, and I will never touch it again. I 
swear I never will.” 

“Now, Billy old boy,” said the Doctor, 
“you know how futile is such a promise, or 
oath. For you, to drink more is to want 




210 


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more. You cannot end a trickling stream by 
pouring on a deluge.” 

“Then let me drink some of the weakest 
stuff you have,” pleaded the sufferer. “It 
cannot hurt me if it contains so little alcohol 
that it is not intoxicating.” 

“Ah! there is the fundamental fallacy, 
which has produced such a large percentage 
of our inebriates and wrecked so many 
promising temperance movements,” ex¬ 
claimed Ross. “The drunkards’ highway is 
paved with such arguments. The reason 
why you plead for little is the same kind of 
reason that makes you crave for much. You 
do not want so-called non-intoxicants at all, 
unless they contain some alcohol. It is 
alcohol, first, last and always, that you seek. 
The only way for you to cease seeking it is 
to let it alone altogether. And that is what 
you are going to do while you are here.” 

“Perhaps I may interest you a little,” he 
continued, “and possibly afford you some 
temporary relief if I make a prediction 
right here with respect to our great home 
country, which is so rapidly adopting the 




Bethesda 


211 


Eighteenth Amendment to its Constitu¬ 
tion.” 

“That amendment, in the form in which 
free men and women are so eagerly voting 
for it, prohibits the manufacture, sale and 
transportation of intoxicating liquors with¬ 
in the United States; and it provides further 
that, 'The Congress and the several States 
shall have concurrent power to enforce this 
article by appropriate legislation.’ This 
means, inter alia, that the statute makers 
are to determine and prescribe what liquors 
are intoxicating. Laws will be made, both 
federal and state, thus to enforce the glo¬ 
rious amendment. My prediction is that men 
will arise all over the land, in Congress, in 
State legislatures and on countless rostra, 
who will proclaim and vociferate the con¬ 
tention that the definitions of the prohibited 
beverages are too broad, and sweeping, and 
include liquors which are not intoxicating. 
And with that refrain will come the roar¬ 
ing protest against their being deprived of 
their inalienable personal liberties. Like 
you, Billy, they will argue that a very little 
alcohol can do no harm, and that such bever- 




212 


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ages are non-intoxicant. But, like you also, 
they will want those beverages because of 
the alcohol which they contain; and by their 
very eager demand for them they will refute 
their own argument. And they will learn 
ultimately, however long it may take, or 
however much of vacillation and adjust¬ 
ment it may follow, that the prohibition of 
beverages containing any material alcohol 
has become essentially and permanently 
complete. The conviction of the evils of in¬ 
temperance—the eager and ardent senti¬ 
ment that is impelling the ratification of the 
Amendment—will impel its thorough execu¬ 
tion. The moving of the Bethesdic water of 
this old world, which we heard so eloquently 
described in Lucerne, Billy, is going on over 
there; and the cure is sure to come.” 

The stress and strain, to a large extent, 
were leaving the face of Calhoun as he 
listened. He raised himself slightly from 
the bed, rested his head on one hand and, 
gesturing slightly with the other, said:— 

“Doc, do you actually put credence in the 
substance of that sermon? Do you believe 
that a superior, beneficent power has so 




Bethesda 


213 


molded the destinies of our race, including 
the utilizing of this hellish war, as to bring 
about the total prohibition which you say 
is coming to America ?” 

“Yes,” answered Ross quietly. “To me 
that is as undeniable as is the fact that 
America exists. As you grow stronger and 
think harder, my boy—if you will compel 
yourself to abstain from intoxicants—you 
also will believe it, even if you do not al¬ 
ready so believe. And you will come to see, 
I am sure, that the meaning of total 
abstinence is found in the word ‘ total / and 
that our noble land, dominant at last— 
though it may only be after a long strug¬ 
gle—over all the shifts and turns, devices 
and meanderings of the 'wets/ can rightly 
enforce absolute prohibition of alcoholic 
beverages, as an incalculable, enduring 
blessing to America, and ultimately to all 
the world/’ 

“God in heaven grant that it may be so,” 
murmured Calhoun. “I want to believe it, 
and am struggling to do so. I want to see 
the inestimable boon come to all future gen¬ 
erations. But as for me, a piece of rotten 





214 


Betliesda 


wreckage on the storm-beaten shore of this 
miserable age,—” 

“Please do not say again that it is too 
late,” panted Mademoiselle Boze’. “It is 
never too late.” 

“Well,” he responded wearily, as he lay 
back upon the bed and closed his eyes; “I 
will accommodate my fine little nurse, in the 
presence of her fine Doctor, by not saying it. 
But oh! if you were to have my present feel¬ 
ings for the millionth part of a second, you 
would appreciate my suffering. I am gain¬ 
ing strength rapidly, however, and may 
soon be able to go away and be once more— 
oh, imps of blackness, what? May I not 
have now a cooling drink of some kind, 
even if it does not contain any alcohol?” 

She wiped her eyes, and went away, down 
the long aisle, to comply with his request. 

“I say Phil,” exclaimed Calhoun, “you are 
a lucky dog, and I congratulate you very 
heartily. That little black-eyed French lady 
is a jewel, and you could find none better. 
There is none better—with one perfect ex¬ 
ception—0 God! 0 God! 0 God! Would 





Bethesda 


215 


that the demons would take me now, and siz¬ 
zle me in eternal damnation.” 

“Hold on William,” cried Ross in deepest 
sympathy, yet unable to suppress a slight 
smile. “I understand she is coming to see 
you again this afternoon. She is human, 
even if she is an angel; and while I am sure 
she would never marry a drunkard, yet 
things may change. You may change them. 
You must and will change them; for after 
we have helped you all we can here, you are 
going to win the fight at last again your ter¬ 
rible foe. So cheer up, Old Man, and give 
her a cordial welcome when she comes.” 

“I am not fit to speak to her,” wailed Cal¬ 
houn. “It is sacrilege for a thing like me 
to think of her; and I have not yet fallen 
quite low enough to be unmindful of that 
fact. I will endure as best I can the torment 
which is being forced upon me here, though 
its severity may cause me to try to get away 
the sooner; and I will do my best to go on 
to success after leaving this watchful ref¬ 
uge. But I tell you now, Phil Ross, that it 
is too late—too late—too late.” 





216 


Bethesda 


His words died away in an echo of des¬ 
pair. 

“Well,” said the Doctor, “let me close this 
quiet disagreement by saying two things to 
you very earnestly. You will live to see that 
it is not too late—you will be glad to see her 
this afternoon. Here comes your cooling 
drink. Adieu.” 

Two hours later, Ruth Overton was again 
sitting at his bedside. This time there was 
no color on her attire to evoke his protest. 
Her sweet little face was grave and care¬ 
worn, for the last few days had been stren¬ 
uous and very exacting of her time and 
strength. Her departure for home seemed 
near at hand. It was only after an earnest 
debate with herself, and a severe introspec¬ 
tion, that she had persuaded herself to come 
to see him this afternoon—probably for the 
last time before her departure. She was 
sitting quietly, with one hand lying upon the 
other in her lap, looking calmly into his 
eyes; and she was saying:— 

“You will soon be strong enough to leave 
this prison house, and go back to your nor¬ 
mal, heroic life. You are going to take with 




Bethesda 


217 


you the esteem and kindliest wishes of all 
who Tiave known you here. We have tried 
to do everything possible for your good.” 

“And you have done it all beautifully and 
graciously,” he answered. “I thank you 
from the bottom of my poor, besotted heart. 
And especially I am grateful for your de¬ 
priving me of alcohol. True, you have fol¬ 
lowed the advice of the doctors; but it has 
been your kind, noble heart that has 
prompted that course and so many other 
measures for my welfare and happiness. 
There will always be a bright place in my 
memory and—esteem, because of it all.” 

He spoke slowly and deliberately, and was 
evidently measuring every word. Coupled 
with the yearning appeal in his eyes and 
countenance and her knowledge of his life 
and its struggles, his words were telling her 
far more than their superficial import. 
She realized also, from the delicate care 
with which they were spoken, that they ex¬ 
pressed the ultimate facts which he would 
not permit himself to speak. She knew he 
must not say more. It might result in trag- 





218 


Bethesda 


edy if he did. And yet, what—yet what— 
what ought she to do, or say? 

He relieved the situation by remarking, 
a little more lightly—“When I have gone 
back to my poor life’s miserable ordeal, do 
not let yourself think ever of the suffering 
that your kind and heroic treatment has 
caused me to endure here. That is for me 
alone, if there is any manhood at all to be 
left in me, to contemplate; and I shall al¬ 
ways cherish it as the most blessed episode 
in my unprofitable life. But you—think of 
me, please, if you can, only as I was when 
we sang together on the moonlit Venetian 
lagoon, or when you watched me holding the 
hymnal in the Church at Lucerne, or even, 
if you please, as you may imagine me when 
I rushed—as I thought to death—upon that 
stream of machine-gun bullets that sent 
me here—to you.” 

“Mr. Calhoun,” she said after a pause and 
a manifest struggle for perfect self con¬ 
trol, “those scenes and memories will al¬ 
ways mean much to me, and that splen¬ 
did heroism in the face of fire will always 
stir my enthusiasm and pride; but I must 




Bethesda 


219 


also assure you that I will always look back, 
with loyal satisfaction and gratitude, on 
your splendid submission to, and obedience 
of, our orders here. Your noble spirit 
through it all has convinced me that ulti¬ 
mately the victory belongs to you. You are 
going to overcome the demon alcohol, and 
rise again to the position in true, sterling, 
Christian manhood which is rightfully 
yours. I should be very unhappy if 1 
thought otherwise. You must win. You 
will win.” 

“Thank you,” he said after a long silence. 
“Oh! thank you—more than I dare to say. 
But, alas! alas! it is too, too late—too fiend¬ 
ishly late. That realization is too—too 
much. Please—please relieve this unbear¬ 
able realization by singing to me the sweet 
little serenade which we sang over there on 
the ‘Lagoon/ The other boys in this ward 
will rejoice to hear it; and for me it may 
serve as a lullaby—paradise.” 

She cleared her throat, hastily wiped the 
moisture from her eyes, and sang. And he 
raised himself quickly on his elbow and 
added his rich tenor voice to the ineffable 






220 


Bethesda 


melody—richly heightened by the pathos 
surging forth from her poor, wounded 
heart. 

’Che bella cosa 9 na iurna 9 e sole . 

N 9 area serena doppo 9 na tempesta , 

9 Pe llaria fresca pare gia y n festa! 

Che bella cosa y n iurnata 9 e sole! 

Ma natu sole } cchiu bello ohine , 
y O sole mio sta nfronte a te } 
y O sole , o 1 sole mio sta nfronte a te, 

Sta nfronte a te , sta nfronte a te, a te . 99 
No chord in heaven is more beautiful than 
the Divine melody of hearts atune. Through 
the long aisles the respectful, almost rever¬ 
ent applause of the listeners—nurses, doc¬ 
tors and wounded boys, resounded again 
and again. But both of the singers were 
far away in thought, and beyond response. 
The little white-robed mistress of the ward 
arose slowly, and, passing around the foot 
of the bed, went to the nearby western win¬ 
dow, and stood with her glowing face turn¬ 
ed toward the declining sun. Calhoun was 
sure, as she stood there, that the effulgence 
from her glorious person was eclipsing 






Bethesda 


221 


every vestige of the brightness of the solar 
rays. He moved as if he would leap from 
the bed and clasp her in his arms. He re¬ 
pressed the movement; but, carried com¬ 
pletely away and forgetting for the instant 
every sense of restraint and caution, he 
turned toward her and, speaking hurriedly 
but so low that only she could hear, he 
said:— 

“Oh! God in heaven, it may not be too 
late. I might, I could, I would win, against 
all the forces of earth and hades, if you, if 
you, fairest and sweetest of beings, could—” 

If the sentence was ever completed, no 
one heard its conclusion. The heavens were 
suddenly aflame. A noise, as of many thun¬ 
derbolts, was resounding and hissing all 
around. Screams, and groans and curses 
were reverberating through the building. 
Glass and debris were flying in every direc¬ 
tion. The window at which Ruth Overton 
had stood was gone. That entire end of the 
structure was shattered. The floor on 
which Calhoun’s bed was resting, the sec¬ 
ond floor above the ground, was rapidly 
slipping away toward the west. Indescrib- 




222 


Bethesda 


able confusion and terror were everywhere. 
He sensed faintly the fact that a shell from 
that monster bug-a-boo—that petted “Ber¬ 
tha” which could play on Paris and at the 
same time demonstrate the inane stupidity 
of German psychology—had once more per¬ 
formed its fiendish “stunt.” 

As the floor sank away toward the shat¬ 
tered side of the building, his bed began to 
slip down the incline. He clutched wildly 
at its side, as if to stay its progress; but 
it rushed on faster and faster. 

His brain and thoughts were in a whirl. 
Darkness was closing in around him. Out 
of the murky blackness, diabolical voices 
began to yell; and the hissing of loathsome 
reptiles rent the air. He was looking, wild¬ 
eyed, into an abyss, the horrors of which his 
former conceptions of hell could not begin 
to approach. Blood was spurting from his 
nose and mouth. His eyes were bursting 
from their sockets. His lungs were emitting 
yells that seemed to him more fiendish than 
those of the devils themselves. He threw 
up his arms and leaped—into oblivion. 





BOOK III 


THE CURE 





CHAPTER XIII 


THE ISSUE 

The “Session,” the governing body, of a 
certain prosperous Presbyterian Church in 
New York City includes, in addition to the 
pastor or “Moderator,” three merchants, 
one judge, one doctor, one college professor, 
one broker and one banker. Their delibera¬ 
tions, at the regular monthly meeting in 
March, 1920, were unusually prolonged and 
earnest. A contribution was sought; and a 
material innovation was being urged. 

Reverend Arthur Buffington, D.D., the 
Moderator, with the patient tact and di¬ 
plomacy that largely accounted for his 
substantial success as the “Under-Shep¬ 
herd” of his flock, had finished the routine 
business, and was asking if there were any 
other matters to come before the meeting. 

“Yes,” said Silas Mack, the clerk, who 

225 



226 


Bethesda 


was one of the three prosperous merchants. 
“I have received a request that we send a 
very substantial offering to the Anti-Saloon 
League, before the end of this fiscal year, 
April first. I think it states very properly 
that the organization, which has brought 
the inestimable blessings of absolute pro¬ 
hibition to our beloved and divinely favored 
country, should receive the unstinted sup¬ 
port of every church in the land. Mrs. 
Mack thinks so, too. I offer a resolution 
that we appropriate one thousand dollars to 
the League, and send half now and the other 
half in six months.” 

“Is that meant to be, ‘Half a league, half 
a league, half a league onward/ ” asked 
good old Elder Silas Jones, the broker, who 
had been a pillar of the Church for over half 
a century and was now, humored and petted 
by everybody, in his dotage. 

“I move that the resolution be laid on the 
table,” said Professor Henry Rand, after the 
quiet smile had gone around and they had 
jibed “Brother Jones” a little. “Any insti¬ 
tution that claims all the credit for 
America’s doing her plain duty in war time 




Bethesda 


227 


should be strong enough to get along with¬ 
out asking anything from the churches. It 
got most of its seeming power by surrepti¬ 
tious enforcement of its demands on our law¬ 
makers—by very much the same kind of 
high-handed methods which the people have 
rebuked and destroyed in the saloons them¬ 
selves—methods as far removed from Chris¬ 
tian Church policy as is the nadir from the 
zenith; and now it comes to us, with its nose 
in the air, and practically says to us, ‘You 
must give.’ I, for one, must not.” 

“Well, well, now,” remarked Elder James 
Farrington, another one of the merchants, 
“it seems to me that we ought not to be too 
hard on anything that really helps us along, 
don’t you know. Now really it may be well 
to think it over a little, do you see what I 
mean? Really, now, I think there may be 
some good in it, don’t you think so, Dom¬ 
inie?” 

“We must proceed carefully in the con¬ 
sideration of the matter,” remarked the 
pastor. 

“Yes, yes, you are right,” chimed in the 
doctor and the banker. 




228 


Bethesda 


The hands of Mr. Mack arose in protest. 
“It is a frightful thing,” he exclaimed, 
“when the great Church militant does not 
stand by her allies in these supreme moral 
conflicts. Never can evil be put down if the 
Church backs down. Think, Brethren, of 
the reeling men over this country of ours, 
and the desolate homes, and the widows 
and orphans, and the rags and poverty, and 
do not withhold your hand to help. ‘Woe 
unto them that rise up early in the morning, 
that they may follow strong drink; that con¬ 
tinue until night, till wine inflame them.’ 
What if some folks’ methods might be 
crude. We are opposing the devil. We must 
fight fire with fire. See how our ladies are 
standing for the right. Mrs. Mack was re¬ 
marking this morning at breakfast—just 
as we were finishing our griddle cakes—that 
the W. C. T. U. have been the real fighters 
of rum. The war helped some, of course; 
but think how the other forces worked— 
and give. I move the adoption of the resolu¬ 
tion.” 

Naturally a silence ensued. The nine men 




Bethesda 


229 


looked at one another. Then the Moderator 
spoke, very deliberately. 

“I am going to ask that the motion be laid 
on the table for the present. It seems to me 
that something has happened in America, 
so vast, so stupendous, that we cannot yet 
grasp its full significance. I do not think 
that it could ever have occurred without the 
Christian Church. The W. C. T. U. had its 
splendid share in the uplifting work. The 
Y. M. C. A.; the Y. W. C. A.; the Knights of 
Columbus; the Salvation Army; the great 
Jewish organizations; and many, many 
other forces (and with them undoubtedly 
the Anti-Saloon League) were all in the pro¬ 
cession. Then the war came and welded per¬ 
haps the useful elements into one mighty 
force moving at Divine command. And yet 
the great result is hard to understand. One 
thing I know, and can say with confidence 
to the enemies of prohibition, who manifest¬ 
ly are going to increase and make more and 
more noise for a time—they cannot succeed. 
Prohibition has come to stay in our fair 
land. America has shown the greatest 
leadership of all the nations of the world 




230 


Bethesda 


through all time in taking this stupendous 
stride. What she has for good she holds. 
What she fights for and wins she protects. 
She will win the fight against alcohol, and 
keep the gains. And yet I stand in reverent 
awe and wonder at the grand, the—dare I 
say it—the almost unexpected result. 

“That feeling should drive us away from 
criticism, and certainly away from con¬ 
demnation of any of the agencies which 
contributed to the result. Let us rather ex¬ 
tol every one of them, and work for a united 
front for them all against the powers that 
are assailing the grand reform. The very 
effective militancy of the Anti-Saloon League 
has made the onslaughts against it the 
more virulent, and will probably continue to 
do so. The greater its achievements against 
rum, the harder it will be fought by rum. 
Let us not be misled into an unfair attack. 
Rather let us laud the position in the van 
which that organization has assumed and 
maintained. And until we have more light 
let us watch and wait.” 

“I will agree to lay the resolution on the 




Bethesda 


231 


table,” said Mr. Mack; and all the others 
concurred. 

Judge Andrew Overton had waited pa¬ 
tiently for this stage in the proceedings. He 
now addressed the Moderator, and said:— 

“It would indeed be difficult to mention 
all the forces and influences that have 
brought about the Eighteenth Amendment 
and our splendid statutes and regulations 
providing for its enforcement. Social con¬ 
ditions, largely the result of better educa¬ 
tion, and economic statutes, among which 
workmen's compensation laws stand forth 
very prominent, should be especially noted, in 
addition to those to which you have refer¬ 
red. The world's plaudits for them all 
should resound through the centuries to 
come. To me also, however, and I believe to 
every one of us, there necessarily come the 
questions, coupled with reverent awe as you 
say, what was it, after all, that was potent 
enough to produce such a result—to bring 
together and unite the scattered units and 
drive them as a single entity to the goal; 
and further, has that result been so brought 
about and perfected that it must endure?” 





232 


Bethesda 


“In this presence we are naturally in¬ 
clined to make monosyllabic answers to 
those two questions, and stop—God! yes! 
But more and more forcibly every day we 
are compelled to notice the very many 
places, growing rapidly in numbers and im¬ 
portance, where people will not stop in that 
manner. It is not at all improbable that 
next Sunday the commodious auditorium of 
this Church may be one of those places.” 

“You are right,” sighed the Dominie. 

“It was a much-cherished privilege of 
mine,” continued the Judge, “on that fate¬ 
ful Sunday in August, 1914, which practic¬ 
ally marked the formal beginning of the 
war, to hear uttered, in the middle of Swit¬ 
zerland, a virtual prophecy of our prohibi¬ 
tion advance and its success. It was in 
Church; and a sentence in the opening 
prayer of the grand old Scotch Divine 
aroused and interested me so much that I 
was more wakeful than usual during the 
service. He was a striking personality, with 
long, flowing white hair and the face of an 
Elijah; and he said, as he prayed, and as 
Europe was rushing to the fray:— 




Bethesda 


233 


“We humble ourselves before thee, 0 God, 
because the nations of Christendom are 
shaming themselves in the eyes of the 
heathen.” 

“His prophecy came at the end of a ser¬ 
mon that ought to be written on the fore¬ 
head of every citizen or denizen of America 
who should ever oppose the Eighteenth 
Amendment or its thorough enforcement.” 

“Tell us the substance of it,” said the 
Doctor. 

“A young man heard it,” responded Over- 
ton,” whose training and experiences entitle 
him to be the narrator. We want him to be 
heard in this Church on a Sunday morning 
at a service to be well advertised. He is not 
a minister; his life threatens to be a failure, 
and there is nothing to recommend him ex¬ 
cept that he has a real, moral, Christian 
message for us all, and we ought to listen 
and heed.” 

“My dear Judge,” remonstrated the Pas¬ 
tor,” no one knows the conservatism of our 
people better than do you. You will agree 
with me, I am sure, in saying that they 
would stoutly object to a Sunday morning 




234 


Bethesda 


lecture by a layman, even of the highest 
character, on a secular subject which bids 
fair to become very largely political.” 

“Well really, now,” said Elder Farring¬ 
ton, “it would seem that that might be true, 
don’t you know. As it seems to me, as I 
think of it, Mrs. Farrington would insist on 
my joining with Mrs. and Mr. Mack in an 
objection, if not in a protest; you under¬ 
stand what I mean?” 

“Yes indeed,” exclaimed the clerk. “Mrs. 
Mack was demanding, only this morning, 
that we purge the Church of its great world¬ 
liness ; and it will have to be done.” 

“I know a sweet little lady,” resumed the 
Judge,” whose motherly opinion you all re¬ 
spect and who can speak quite accurately 
about the general feeling of our congrega¬ 
tion as to such matters. She knows the 
young man whom I mentioned, and can tell 
us accurately about the message which he 
has for us and for his fellow countrymen. 
If you will permit it, I will call her over to 
say a few words. Her heart is in the cause. 
She will be brief.” 




Bethesda 


235 


The consent was unanimous and very 
cordial. 

A benediction seemed to come into the 
room a few minutes later when Eleanor 
Overton entered it in response to her hus¬ 
band’s telephonic call. The world needs 
such beings as she, far more deeply than it 
needs dogma, creeds, or nicely balanced the¬ 
ories of life. The soul, which rose in her 
sixty years ago, has normally risen on and 
on; and the exquisitely beautiful counte¬ 
nance in which it is mirrored, untouched by 
anything sinister or artificial, has grown 
more and more transcendently lovely as the 
days have advanced. No wonder that the 
children automatically run to greet her, or 
that all of God’s creatures are her friends 
at sight, or that men put away their differ¬ 
ences to listen with solicitous respect to her 
words. She said:— 

“Gentlemen, I thank you for giving me 
an opportunity to speak to you about Wil¬ 
liam Calhoun. He heard in Lucerne the 
Scotch minister’s discourse of which my 
husband has told you; and, during the five 
and a half years since then, its truth has 




236 


Bethesda 


burned itself into the life of his soul. It 
helps him to tell the story of prohibition as 
few, if any, others could ever tell it. And 
there are added to his apprehension of the 
Divine method, back of, and under, and 
through the Eighteenth Amendment, ex¬ 
periences, trials, struggles, failures and de¬ 
feats, in his personal contest with alcohol, 
which enable him to speak from depths, and 
from heights also, very largely unknown or 
unappreciated.” 

“After hearing that sermon, the subject 
of which was ‘Bethesda,’ he went through 
the war as a private in the French army; 
and struggled, with little success, against 
his besetting sin, intemperance. Being 
severely wounded a few weeks before the 
armistice, he was taken to a hospital and put 
into a ward which was under the care of 
our daughter, Ruth. The shell from the 
long-range ‘Bertha,’ which sent Ruth back 
to us with a slightly shortened left arm, 
after her miraculous escape from death 
as the explosion carried her down with the 
end of the building in which they were, also 
nearly caused his death. But the unpre- 




Bethesda 


237 


cedented surgical and medical skill, which 
was performing so many marvels in those 
days, sent him back also to his native land, 
about six months ago.” 

“His lifelong friend, Doctor Philip Ross, 
whom I think some of you know, told me of 
his almost hopeless struggle against alcohol, 
and I have had a couple of intensely inter¬ 
esting talks with him. He wants an oppor¬ 
tunity, amid favorable surroundings, to 
tell the true story of drunkenness, and of 
what has occurred and is yet to come for its 
overthrow. The best kind of religious work 
that a church can do is to give to such a 
man the best possible chance to be heard. I 
may add that Ruth, who has not seen him, 
however, since that shell demolished its tar¬ 
get near Paris, wishes me to say that she 
knows him well enough to be able to assure 
you that he will not say anything that any 
of us would not wish to have said in our 
beautiful, sacred edifice. I thank you again, 
gentlemen, and trust that our request may 
be granted.” 

“By the way,” added Judge Overton, “if 
we let him speak, we should invite him, also, 




238 


Bethesda 


to join our choir that morning; for he has 
an exceptionally fine tenor voice/’ 

Ten days later, William Calhoun had a 
solo part with the choir of Dr. Buffington’s 
church, at the morning service. Through¬ 
out the congregational singing of the open¬ 
ing hymns, he listened intently from the 
choir loft in the back part of the edifice for 
a beloved voice from a pew near the middle 
of the crowded auditorium. But it was not 
heard; and the little white-robed figure sat 
there motionless, with face turned always 
toward the pulpit in front. When the time 
for the discourse had come, he left the choir 
loft, walked up the side aisle and upon the 
rostrum and sat down by the Pastor’s side. 

A mighty change had taken place in those 
features and that countenance since the 
time when the handsome youth stepped 
from his gondola into the Hotel Europa, in 
July, 1914, to join his two friends for their 
summer’s outing. The unquenchable fire 
was still in the eye, but it was now rather 
the fire of desperation than that of youth¬ 
ful joy or contentment. The high, broad 
forehead was still noble, but it showed that 




Bethesda 


239 


the furrows would soon be ineradicable. 
There was a slight quivering about the cor¬ 
ners of the mouth, indicative of a growing 
nervousness that would not down. The face 
was very pale, and the cheeks sallow. If the 
chin seemed firmer it was simply the proof 
of an ever-increasing battle for self mas¬ 
tery. Back of the right ear, easily apparent, 
was a bare place where the hair, straighter 
and longer than of old, would never grow 
again—evidently a result of his encounter 
with machine-gun bullets. Viewed in its 
entirety, the face was that of a man ten or 
fifteen years older than when we first knew 
him, with a pathetically desperate expres¬ 
sion that does not belong to youth. And 
yet, with it all, was an aspect of dauntless 
determination, which nothing but death 
could ever quench. If he died, he would be 
still fighting with his face to the foe. 

Dr. Buffington, the good, popular Pastor, 
stepped to the pulpit, glanced over his large 
Church now filled to its capacity and said:— 

“The mission of the Church of Christ is 
to serve mankind for eternal good. Prob¬ 
ably in no sphere or direction could its ef- 






240 


Bethesda 


forts be more powerfully beneficent than in 
making the way clear for the onward march 
of total prohibition of alcohol as a beverage. 
Few men have such training or ability to 
expound that subject as has he whom we 
are privileged to hear this morning. His 
subject is THE CURE. , We shall gain 
much from his words; and we welcome him 
heartily to this rostrum. It gives me much 
pleasure to present to you Mr. William Cal¬ 
houn.” 

Calhoun arose, and after a few words of 
grateful acknowledgment to pastor and 
people, plunged into the topic announced. 




CHAPTER XIV 


REMEDY 

“Each one of us can make only a few 
‘footprints on the sands of time.’ We owe 
it to humanity not to be derelict as to the 
broadcasting of the lives that make them. 
That is why I am here. The evils of intem¬ 
perance, the remedy for those evils, and the 
perpetuation of that remedy are the three 
natural divisions of my subject, ‘The Cure.’ ” 

“The magnitude and ravages of the evils 
need but little discussion. They stand forth 
pre-eminent in the annals of the woe and 
misery, poverty and wretchedness, insanity, 
vice, crime and hopeless degradation of our 
race. The dictum of early English, that to 
speak of ‘a drunken man is as much as to 
say, a drowned man,’ looks backward to the 
dawn of history, and forward to the present 
hour. No one will seriously question the 


241 



242 


Bethesda 


statement that the dominion of alcohol is, 
and always has been, a super-major curse of 
humanity.” 

“Of the insidiousness of this fiendish foe 
of man I may speak a little more fully be¬ 
cause that is its characteristic most fre¬ 
quently and easily overlooked. If youth 
could know the vicious subtlety of strong 
drink as mature manhood frequently under¬ 
stands it only when it is too late, the high¬ 
ways and by-ways of history would not have 
been strewn, as they are, with inebriate 
wreckage, nor with the heaps of human 
debris drawn from the families of besotted 
men. Too many of us are unaware, or at 
least act as if we were unaware, of the fact 
that, in this respect, alcohol as a tempter is 
unique. We are apt to think of a drunkard, 
or at any rate to treat him, as if he had de¬ 
liberately chosen his awful career; and we 
quite commonly ascribe his sin to wilful in¬ 
tent. In this we err. For few, very few 
start down the winding pathway to dipso¬ 
mania with any intention of continuing 
therein, or with any thought that they may 
possibly do so; and very rarely does he who 




Betliesda 


243 


traverses that way have any knowledge or 
apprehension of the point therein to which, 
having reached and passed, he cannot re¬ 
trace his steps.” 

“Let him who would fain belittle the evils 
of intemperance, or who prates of liberty 
lost in any restraint of his acquisition or use 
of wine, or whiskey, or beer, take note for a 
moment of this frightful feature of the 
thing with which he is tampering. Unlike 
most other seductions, it comes as a rule to 
him who is to be its dupe and victim in the 
guise of an entirely innocent enjoyment; 
and at the beginning it is so in reality. 
There is no sin, no harm, no semblance of 
moral turpitude, in a single drink of wine; 
and it is impossible to say, in most cases of 
continued indulgence, where the innocence 
ends and the vice begins. With me, for ex¬ 
ample, that point was reached long ago—oh! 
it seems like an eternity ago, though it is 
really but a few years—but I cannot begin 
to tell when, or where, or how. I only know 
that there came a night—blacker than a 
thousand hells could make an eternity of 
damnation—when for the first time I real- 




244 


Bethesda 


ized that I had advanced along the stygian 
path far, far beyond the line—if there be 
such—which divides a decent, sober life 
from despicable drunkenness and ultimate 
inebriety and hopeless death. I may add, if 
you will pardon the further personal allu¬ 
sion, that the disgraceful scene that in¬ 
augurated my conception of the frightful 
abyss into which I had fallen occurred just 
before the beginning of the war, on the 
bridge of the Rialto at Venice; and I per¬ 
formed then and there a feat of real oratory 
combined with inane stupidity and fiendish¬ 
ness, which readily apprised my two noble, 
loyal, stalwart friends with whom I was 
traveling, of the fact that was being so 
ruthlessly borne in upon me—of the fact, 
once told of himself in the blackness of mid¬ 
night to Jean Valjean, that I had been ‘dead 
for a long time/ ” 

“Before that night I had fondly, and stu¬ 
pidly, thought that I ‘communed' with my 
wine or whiskey, that we were peculiarly 
and happily united in a sort of dissoluble 
friendship, and that we could and would 
part company whenever I pleased. There 






Bethesda 


245 


was no faint conception on my part of the 
strangle hold that my master was acquir¬ 
ing over me. In that respect, I was like the 
rank and file of the myriads of wretched 
dupes of alcohol in all the ages.” 

“Oh! would that I was able to describe, or 
to illustrate, the sequel to the awakening 
from that fatal delusion—the direful, des¬ 
perate, hopeless struggles; the hopes, some¬ 
times raised high, shattered and dashed to 
the ground; the firm resolves, struck down 
and trodden under foot; the terrible sacri¬ 
fice and self flagellations, ultimately becom¬ 
ing vain and useless; the soul-searing reali¬ 
zation of what might have been, lost and 
gone and counted for naught; the steadily 
advancing realization of waning power, 
diminishing desire for the good and true, 
gradual but certain decline of aspiration, 
solicitude and hope. My words, which are 
the best I have, are wholly inadequate to tell 
the frightful story, the story of that which 
is continuing ruthlessly to burn out my life, 
as it has burned out the lives of so many 
myriads of similar victims. A tiger tortur¬ 
ing its prey ere it is to be strangled, or a 




246 


Betkesda 


venomous reptile charming and holding in 
durance the dove that it will at last devour 
is but a feeble, shadowy type of the long- 
drawn out, fiendish gambols of alcohol with 
the indescribable craving, the relentless 
thirst of its slowly tortured victims. 

“May I emphasize, in a word, the insidi¬ 
ous, subtle approach and ensuing, insolent 
domination of strong drink as its unique 
features, unthought of by the beginner in 
its use. Other dangers are more obvious. 
Strychnine, cyanide of potassium, chloro¬ 
form, or even heroin advertises its own dan¬ 
gers. Excessive indulgence, in most of its 
forms, gives ample warning of baneful re¬ 
sults. The gambler, the roue, the opium ad¬ 
dict chooses his course with quite adequate 
appreciation of its goal. But most drunk¬ 
ards are drunkards before they begin to 
realize that they must keep on getting 
drunk; and when that realization comes, 
they are in a vice-like grip that tightens, 
and tightens more, till the frightful end is 
reached. 

“What honest man or woman could even 
lament the loss of any personal liberty, or 




Bethesda 


247 


think twice of any individual sacrifice or 
temporary hardship, as a cause for staying 
for an instant an effectual remedy for such 
an evil? 

“My friends, our race was made and exists 
for a glorious destiny. We do not have to 
be churchmen or religionists to believe, to 
know, that it must go on ‘from more to 
more.’ Perfection is its goal. In that pro¬ 
cess, there comes of necessity, sometime, 
somewhere, an effectual remedy for the 
frightful, withering cure of intemperance. 
Where? When? How? The united voice 
of humanity, with only a few discordant 
notes and those practically negligible, an¬ 
swers that a beneficent guide, a force if you 
please not ourselves, ‘which makes for 
righteousness,’ ‘a destiny that shapes our 
ends,’ an energy sentient and wise which 
cannot fail, GOD will fix the time and the 
occasion. And I come here this morning to 
add, and to prove, the assertion that the oc¬ 
casion and time have been fixed, and the 
remedy, sure and unfailing, is already ap¬ 
plied. Listen! 

“The nations were rushing to the fray. 




248 


Bethesda 


The bells that called to worship on that 
quiet summer Sunday in 1914 were ringing 
the prelude to the noise of the mightiest 
conflict. Thoughtful men, who had believed 
that great wars were no longer possible, 
were asking, why? Into Europe’s rock-rib¬ 
bed oasis, there came, to make definite an¬ 
swer, a reverend seer, from the land of 
Knox and Bruce and Scott. Fortunate were 
they, who like myself were there in Lucerne 
to hear that noble discourse. It was more 
than a prophecy. It was a calm, logical de¬ 
scription of that which even then was being 
accomplished. 

“It began with a review of what the 
speaker designated the ‘procession of the 
empires’ successively dominating the land of 
Palestine, in the process of paving the way 
for the coming of the ‘Prince of Peace/ and 
the fixing of the pivotal point in human his¬ 
tory—thus proving the fulfilment to that 
extent of the mandate,— 

‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make 
straight in the desert a highway for our 
God. Every valley shall be exalted, and 
every mountain and hill shall be made low; 




Bethesda 


249 


and the crooked shall be made straight, and 
the rough places plain; and the glory of the 
Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall 
see it together; for the mouth of the Lord 
hath spoken it.’ 

“When that process was thus far complete, 
when in accordance with the eternal man¬ 
date Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece and 
Rome, each waxing more potent than its 
predecessor, had performed its fixed duty 
in the unfolding of the eternal plan, when 
all roads led to Rome, and the flight of her 
eagles was nowhere obstructed, and there 
was ‘peace over all the known world,’ then 
it was, and not possibly till then, that the 
Angels’ song glorified the plains of Beth¬ 
lehem, and the star went before the Sages 
from the East, ‘till it came and stood over 
where the young Child was.’ 

“And the Child grew, and ‘increased in 
wisdom and stature, and in favor with God 
and man,’ and went steadily forward to His 
Cross, the central, pivotal point in the his¬ 
tory of the world and the universe. 

“One bright Sabbath day, near the Sheep 
Gate at Jerusalem, He healed an impotent 




250 


Betliesda 


man and bade him take up his bed and walk. 
As He performed that miracle, he looked 
upon a representation in miniature of the 
way in which God moves, and shapes the 
destinies of men, and nations, and the world. 
For there was the pool of Bethesda. And 
'an angel went down at a certain season into 
the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever 
then first after the troubling of the water 
stepped in was made whole of whatsoever 
disease he had/ 

"That process exemplified—for the ob¬ 
vious purpose of that minute sheet of water 
was to exemplify and illustrate—the work¬ 
ing out of the plan and providence, which 
in harmony with man’s freedom of action 
determine the great and important events in 
human history. Bethesda was the world in 
miniature, the type, the sample, the exempli- 
fier of men, nations, races, civilization. It 
was not placed there in Jerusalem at that 
crucial time for any other purpose. The 
waters of this great world pool of ours are 
troubled from time to time—at certain sea¬ 
sons—and the first then to step in after the 





Bethesda 


251 


troubling of the water, be it man, nation, or 
race, is healed. 

“It matters little so far as the fact of its 
operation is concerned how we regard, or 
by what name we designate, such a troub¬ 
ling of the water. Call it a wave of thought 
if you please, or a universal mandate, or an 
intellectual congeries, or a psychic co-opera¬ 
tion ; or reverently call it God. The fact re¬ 
mains always that it exists, and operates 
from time to time in the world. When the 
time is ripe, when the hour strikes, when the 
conditions and circumstances are matured 
and right, for an important discovery, a 
great invention, a better understanding of 
our lives or their environment—for any for¬ 
ward movement of peoples, races, or nations 
—our world-pool water is troubled; and 
some man, or nation, or race steps first into 
the water and is healed; and the ultimate 
result is that, to some extent be it great or 
small, mankind advances to a higher plane, 
and becomes wiser, happier and better. 

“Let a hopeless drunkard, a confirmed 
inebriate, backed by the inspiration of the 
sermon on which I am drawing, here chal- 




252 


Bethesda 


lenge the doubter, the agnostic, the infidel, 
the atheist, the bolshevist, and the foe of 
temperance or of total prohibition of intoxi¬ 
cating beverages, to gainsay the existence 
of such movings of our world-pool water, or 
their beneficent results. If that challenge 
could be successfully met, our civilization 
would be a travesty, and our lives a dreary 
farce. There must be a plan, or there is 
nothing but chaos, darkness, death. ‘Where 
there is no vision the people perish.’ 

“May I also venture to suggest that the 
issue, now steadily growing and manifestly 
to be bitterly fought out in the years just 
ahead of us, the issue between ‘wets’ and 
‘drys’ so-called is fundamentally involved in 
that challenge. If prohibition has come, 
through the Eighteenth Amendment to our 
Federal Constitution and the Volstead and 
other enforcement acts, as the result of 
such a moving of the water—a cure for 
America as she stepped first into the troub¬ 
led pool—then it is here to remain, more 
enduring than the ‘Eternal Hills,’ as change¬ 
less as the mind of God. Let a summary 
suffice, of how the grand old Scotch Divine, 




Bethesda 


253 


whose sermon we are considering, marshaled 
the facts of history, individual and national, 
to demonstrate his proposition. Those facts 
stand forth, when we view them aright, 
plain and unmistakable, in both their proc¬ 
esses and their products or results. 

“In the middle of the seventeenth century, 
the commercial and industrial interests of 
the world were calling for such an advance 
as only the invention of the steam engine 
could cause. From all over the globe at 
once came the proclamation that the thing 
was done by Watt in England; by Papin in 
France; in Spain by Blasco de Gavay; by a 
different claimant in every country. 

“Sir Humphrey Davy got the credit for 
inventing the safety lamp for miners, just 
as Professor Bell obtained the applause of 
mankind for perfecting the telephone; but 
each of them was bringing his device to its 
climax even while more humble investi¬ 
gators were separately doing essentially the 
same thing. Witness the law suits and con¬ 
troversies as to infringements and viola¬ 
tions of resulting rights and claims. 

“ ‘Who,’ exclaimed the gifted logician in 




254 


Bethesda 


his sermon ever succeeded in counting, 
when Roentgen announced the discovery of 
the X-ray, the number of voices that arose in 
every clime, crying: “We knew that; we 
were at work and well along, in that line of 
investigation." Or who could begin to num¬ 
ber the same kinds of people—the Marconis, 
the DeForesis, the Steinmetzes—who have 
shouted in the same manner about wireless 
telegraphy and the multitudinous radio- 
graphic marvels which the kaleidoscope of 
science is now producing day by day. 

“He was right in his insistence that we 
never can explain such things by any theory 
of imposture, or coincidence, or chance. No 
such theory can possibly tell why sev¬ 
eral nations claim the discovers of America 
and deny the credit to Columbus, or why the 
Crusades started all over Europe at the 
same time, or why the Reformation began 
in many different countries at once. The 
thought, the impulse, the stirring, the troub¬ 
ling of the water was abroad; men felt the 
impetus, and stepped in and were cured— 
at the Bethesda of the world. 

“Appomattox. Yorktown. Trafalgar, 





Bethesda 


255 


Waterloo, Orleans, Philippi, Thermopylae, 
Arbela, Armageddon and Chateau Thierry 
were not accidents or uncertainties. You 
can not thus account for any one of them; 
any more than you can tell strategically why 
the Germans did not go on into Paris during 
the first battle of the Marne.” 

“Florence Nightingale was simply the 
first step into the limelight in the Red Cross 
movement. True type as she was of the 
best of her sex, she would no more have 
claimed to be the cause of that great move¬ 
ment for the good of suffering humanity 
than would William Lloyd Garrison, or 
Henry Ward Beecher, or Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, or Wendell Phillips have claimed the 
credit for the abolition of the slaves in this 
country. They knew that they were rather 
the products than the cause of mighty proc¬ 
esses which were sure to go on till the work 
was done. When the time and occasion ar¬ 
rived for the great forward movement of 
humanity, the advance proceeded as irresis¬ 
tibly as the revolution of a planet in its orbit 
—as surely as the troubling of the water, by 
the Angel, in the pool of Bethesda, while 




256 


Bethesda 


The Master was gently raising the impotent 
man to his feet.” 

“My friends, we may question some of the 
illustrations, or criticize some of the reason¬ 
ing of that grand old Seer from Scotland, 
whose sermon I have epitomized. But if 
we are honest with ourselves, if we will 
let our thoughts recount the many other il¬ 
lustrations that may come trooping to us, if 
we will just permit ourselves to forget to be 
wilfully sceptical for a time, the fundamental 
truth which he proclaimed will become a 
part of the very life of our souls. ‘Man can¬ 
not live by bread alone.’ We dare not, we 
will not go on without these fundamental 
truths; for our race must attain to its ap¬ 
pointed destiny. May I quote the closing 
words of that prophetic sermon? They 
were:— 

‘We may go out from this sacred edifice 
ere long to behold the fearsome spectacle 
of the world at war. If that condition 
comes, it may be the mightiest of all 
troublings of this great pool of ours. And 
if so, some men and women, some nation 
or nations will step into the water and be 




Bethesda 


257 


healed. And the net result will be some 
important advance, some splendid on¬ 
ward movement—perhaps many of them 
—of mankind. We know not what that 
gain or those gains may be. We can 
hardly surmise. 

'God moves in a mysterious way 
His wonders to perform: 

He plants his footsteps in the sea, 

And rides upon the storm.' 

Let me briefly suggest, however, one 
healing, one benefaction, which would be 
a fitting and adequate compensation for 
so stupendous a price. I refer to the 
awful, and thus far in our day the grow¬ 
ing, curse of intemperance. The awk¬ 
ward shifts which we have thus far made 
against that satanic malady of man, the 
little palliatives that we have tried to ap¬ 
ply and the fanatical efforts which our 
misguided zeal has often made seem to 
many of us thus far to have been worse 
than futile. It may be—God grant that 
it may be—that this frightful, barbarous 
conflict, if it come, may prove to be, inter 
alia , a troubling of the water against 





258 


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drunkenness, and that entire nations— 
for I believe the remedy must so come— 
may step into the pool and be healed. 

God does not make wars. He would 
have to curb the freedom of sinful man’s 
will, if he were to prevent them. They 
may be, and frequently have been, used 
as the pool which His ministering angels 
enter and trouble—for the healing of the 
nations. Witness Armageddon, the Cri¬ 
mea, or the American Rebellion. The 
Omnipotent Healer, the Divine Physician 
will not let an unprecedented conflict of 
nations come and go in vain. 

‘Jesus walked near the Sheep Gate on 
that Sabbath morning, and looked on a 
miniature of the works and ways of His 
Father and ours. Then He went stead¬ 
fastly toward His Cross, the Cross around 
which those works and ways from ever¬ 
lasting to everlasting, are ordained to 
move.’ 

“The unprecedented conflict did not come 
and go in vain. 

“Men of America, listen! 

“Women of America, listen! 




Bethesda 


259 


“It is not a long-haired son of Sancti¬ 
mony who addresses you. No rich man is 
praying that a Lazarus be sent to his 
father’s house to warn his brothers of their 
peril. It is an ordinary, hopeless drunkard, 
a desperate, remediless inebriate, who is 
speaking to you, as it were, from the depths 
of the bottomless pit—where he will soon be. 
He is calling with all the energy that can 
come from certainty of eternal damnation. 
And he is repeating to you those glowing 
words ,—‘The unprecedented conflict did not 
come and go in vain.’ It was a troubling of 
the water, a mighty troubling; and the cure 
has come to the first to step in, the 
United States of America. The expulsion 
of the demon alcohol from our beloved 
country has become assured. 

“The pool of Bethesda lay near the Sheep 
Gate in Jerusalem, ready for the troubling 
of the water at a certain period by an 
Angel. The setting was there, prepared for 
the coming of the moving force. So it has 
always been in the illustrations employed 
by our Scottish Divine, and to which I have 
referred. So it has always been when the 




260 


Bethesda 


hour has arrived for a great forward move¬ 
ment of the human race. 

“The procession of the empires’ cleared 
the way and laid out the paths—completed 
the necessary setting—for the coming of 
the ‘Son of Man/ 

“For ten long centuries after Gregory the 
Great, abuses of spiritual strength, growth 
of ignorance in high ecclesiastical places, 
perversion of church offices, misuse of 
privileges and censures, lapse of holy friars 
into pestilential mendicants, and endless 
greed and grasping everywhere by the 
Church made conditions fit for a mighty 
upheaval. Wyckliffe, Huss, and Jerome; 
Reuchlin, Erasmus, Groot and Thomas 
a Kempis, ‘Reformers before the Reforma¬ 
tion/ saw the light and acted their noble 
parts. But it was not till Tetzel was bla¬ 
tantly selling ‘indulgences’ near Wittenberg, 
and the Franciscan friars were doing the 
same in Switzerland, and the open evils 
were shamelessly rampant all over Europe 
that the time was fully ripe. Then the 
water was troubled; Martin Luther stepped 
first into the pool; Zwingli in Switzerland 




Bethesda 


261 


followed quickly; and then in rapid succes¬ 
sion came the cure of the Reformation to 
England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hol¬ 
land, Germany, Switzerland—the world. 

“The revival of learning, the growth of 
business and enterprise, and even the pomp 
and glory of feudal strength set the stage 
for the utilization of steam, the erection of 
the printing press, the discovery of 
America, and the spread of commerce 
around the globe. 

“The invention of the cotton gin had stay¬ 
ed somewhat the agitation against slavery 
in America, soon after it was done away 
with in England and most of the countries 
of the Old World. But soon came the reac¬ 
tion and the setting of the stage here. In 
the wake of the great work of ‘The Lib¬ 
erator' came the Underground Railroad, 
the estrangement more and more of North 
and South, the futile efforts to adjust in ter¬ 
ritory, such as the Missouri Compromise, 
and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Dred 
Scott decision and the election of Mr. Lin¬ 
coln as President—a radical abolitionist. 
And then, with John Brown’s raid and the 




262 


Bethesda 


firing on Fort Sumter, came the great 
troubling of the water that culminated in 
the Emancipation Proclamation. 

“In every instance, the time became ripe, 
the hour struck, the conditions and circum¬ 
stances were perfected; and then the great 
forward movement came, more inevitably 
than the rising and setting of the sun. 

'The mountains look on Marathon; 

And Marathon looks on the sea/ 

“The setting is always perfect for the 
classic contest. 

“The setting was perfect for the Eigh¬ 
teenth Amendment to our Constitution and 
the enforcement statutes. In demonstrat¬ 
ing that fact but little needs to be said of 
the teachings of the abortive efforts in small 
communities, even in entire states, to en¬ 
force total prohibition; and it is not neces¬ 
sary to enumerate or dwell on the temper¬ 
ance organizations and the moral and re¬ 
ligious forces, which were heroically doing 
their respective shares in educating and 
molding public sentiment. All praise and 
glory to every one of them—even to the few 
which in their zeal were erratic, foolish, or 





Bethesda 


263 


even harmful to the cause. But there was 
one influence—thus far too little noted or 
credited I fear in this respect—which should 
receive special attention for a moment. I 
refer to our workmen’s compensation laws, 
which spread over our land with such amaz¬ 
ing rapidity in the half dozen years immedi¬ 
ately preceding the great war. 

“Those statutes invert the old common law 
rule, which made a servant assume all the 
ordinary risks incident to his employment, 
by requiring the master, the employer, to 
respond in damages whenever his employee 
while acting within the scope of his employ¬ 
ment is killed or injured as the result of an 
accident, unless it is occasioned by his wil¬ 
ful intention to bring about the injury or 
death of himself or some other person, or 
unless it results solely from his intoxication 
while on duty. Now injuries to a drunken 
man very rarely result solely from his in¬ 
toxication. Under the new law, it is always 
to be presumed, in the absence of substan¬ 
tial evidence to the contrary, that the injury 
did not result solely from intoxication, and 





264 


Bethesda 


also that the employee did not have any wil¬ 
ful intent to injure any one.” 

“The time came in our industrial and 
economic development when we could move 
forward to a higher plane in the care and 
protection of the laboring classes; and this 
fundamental change in a fundamental law 
came as naturally as the core comes into an 
apple. The water of the Bethesdic pool of 
America was troubled; and the richly-de¬ 
serving toilers stepped therein first and 
were healed. There is no other adequate 
explanation of such a mighty, spontaneous 
reversal of the laws of labor. And notice 
the outcome in the setting of the stage—the 
pool—for the coming of the more stu¬ 
pendous change. 

“The employers of labor, whether wit¬ 
tingly or unwittingly it matters not, pro¬ 
ceeded to make this change as to drunken¬ 
ness an incalculable blessing, by putting in¬ 
to operation a rule—now made a part of 
practically every contract of employment— 
that any workman seen entering a saloon 
where intoxicating liquors are sold as a 
beverage, or found materially under the in- 




Bethesda 


265 


fluence of such liquor, shall immediately be 
discharged from his employment. Thus the 
sobriety of a laborer is bound up with his 
his means of supporting himself and his 
family. 

“Could you imagine a more potent single 
influence, a more direct preparation for 
effectually coping with the diabolical power 
of alcohol? Let the various other laudable 
agencies working for temperance be added 
to such a magnificent economic develop¬ 
ment; and thinking men would naturally 
look forward—as many of them are clearly 
on record as having done—to an ultimate 
troubling of the world pool, which should 
result in a perfect cure for intemperance. 

“It came apace. The boys and our hearts 
were crossing to the ‘other side.’ They were 
over there struggling and dying for us. 
Those who returned might not covet or wel¬ 
come a pecuniary reward. But they must 
come back to a better land than that which 
they left. The ‘folks back home’ sought a 
way to do their part nobly in the improve¬ 
ment of that home. Could there possibly be 
a more definite troubling of the water than 





266 


Bethesda 


that which was thus brought about by the 
war of wars ? We must shut our eyes to the 
facts if we do not see that an arbiter, a de¬ 
signer, a guiding hand, a something outside 
of ourselves, call it what we may, was thus 
troubling the water, in order that we might 
step in and be eternally cured. Let the se¬ 
quence of events set forth the uncontrovert¬ 
ible truth. Those who had eyes to see noted 
well their significance as they came in rapid 
succession. 

“Nearly a third of a century ago, the Fed¬ 
eral Government began to aid the States— 
working alone within too narrow limits— 
which were struggling for absolute prohibi¬ 
tion within their own borders. It did so in 
the "Wilson Act/ whereby intoxicating 
liquor imported into a State became at once 
subject to the operation and effect of that 
State’s laws, to the same extent and in the 
same manner as though it had been pro¬ 
duced within that State. 

“Twenty-three years later, the "Webb- 
Kenyon’ law prohibited the importation of 
such liquor into a State to be used there 
in violation of its local law. And only four 





Bethesda 


267 


years thereafter, in the ‘Reed Bone-Dry 
Amendment,’ came the national mandate, in¬ 
terdicting forever the transfer in interstate 
commerce of any intoxicating liquor, except 
for scientific, sacramental, medicinal, or 
mechanical purposes, into any State or Ter¬ 
ritory, the laws of which prohibited its 
manufacture or sale therein for beverage 
purposes. 

“When we add to these the stringent 
Alaskan Prohibition law enacted by Con¬ 
gress in February, 1917, the similar enact¬ 
ment for Porto Rico in the next month, the 
same for the District of Columbia in No¬ 
vember of that year, and for Hawaii in the 
following August, and then study the splen¬ 
did safeguards, shielding our soldiers from 
intoxicants, embodied in the ‘Draft Law,’ 
enacted just as we entered the war, we must 
know that the way was being prepared; a 
highway was being made straight, and the 
rough places plain for the coming of a 
mighty reform—the throttling of the most 
vicious foe of America’s young manhood. 

“It needed only the final troubling of the 




268 


Bethesda 


water to perfect the cure. And the war was 
used for that troubling as surely as the war 
was fought and won for the right. We can¬ 
not doubt it if we think and face the facts. 

“The ultimate troubling of the water be¬ 
gan on the third day of December, 1917— 
in the midst of our participation in the con¬ 
flict—when Congress sent forth to the States 
the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitu¬ 
tion; and the cure was proclaimed on the 
twenty-ninth day of January, 1919, when 
the Secretary of State announced its rati¬ 
fication by the necessary three-fourths of 
the States. 

“If all history and all logic and all com¬ 
mon sense did not show the inevitableness 
of such a troubling and such a cure, it would 
be shown by the spontaneous eagerness with 
which the States of this country hastened 
to ratify that amendment. They would do 
it again, and by even greater majorities, if 
necessary. It would be an emphatic repeti¬ 
tion of a Betliesdic phenomenon. 

“It is to be noted that, whereas the 
affirmative vote of three-fourths of the 
States was necessary to enact the Eigh- 





Bethesda 


269 


teenth Amendment, the negative votes of 
three-fourths of them would now be re¬ 
quired to cause its repeal. 

“Jesus stood by Bethesda and looked on 
the miniature of humanity’s progress. A 
mighty factor in that progress has here 
taken its place. Its perpetuation is as sure 
as was its coming. It is here to stay, as in¬ 
evitably as is the race which is to enjoy its 
inestimable blessings. Its insignia will go 
on glowing more and more as the years ad¬ 
vance. 

‘Forever singing as they shine, 

The hand that made us is Divine.’ 

“Criticism, just and unjust, uncertainties, 
difficulties, confusion and turmoil, some 
retrogression perhaps and even truly de¬ 
plorable results will follow the enforcement 
of so radical a reform. What grand ad¬ 
vance or noble achievement ever escaped 
them entirely? Witness the decades of dire¬ 
ful results of the sudden emancipation of 
our slaves, and the bestowal of the ballot 
upon them so soon thereafter. Witness the 
loss of employment by honest workingmen 
and the consequent suffering and misery, 




270 


Betliesda 


which follow every important labor-saving 
invention or device. The rule of real prog¬ 
ress has some striking analogies to the law 
or doctrine of the ‘survival of the fittest.' 
Yet the net result is grandly good. So will it 
be—so it must be, with total prohibition of 
alcohol as a beverage in these United States. 
If it also requires decades to perfect its ab¬ 
solute sway, those many years will bring at 
last the glorious fruition. 

“Already the protest is gaining headway, 
which insists that the Volstead Act and the 
rapidly multiplying state enforcement 
statutes are too radical and too severe, that 
liquors containing no more than one-half of 
one per cent, of alcohol include many bever¬ 
ages which are not intoxicating, and that 
thereby to include light wines and beer in 
the sweeping interdiction is to invite a re¬ 
vulsion of popular feeling which sooner or 
later will sweep away the entire system. 
May I venture to suggest that we should, 
and doubtless most of us here believe we 
will, go very slow in listening to such calls 
and demands. They may have some lasting 
merit, A few of the States may modify 





Bethesda 


271 


their enforcement statutes. But it has been 
well said already that the cry for less strin¬ 
gency comes, as a rule, from those who, if 
they confessed all, would simply say ‘I want 
a drink/ The narrow restriction to one- 
half of one per cent, of alcohol was adopted 
because that was the percentage to desig¬ 
nate intoxicants fixed on by the liquor deal¬ 
ers themselves with the Commissioner of 
Internal Revenue long before the Eigh¬ 
teenth Amendment was enacted, and espe¬ 
cially because that rule of percentage is 
safe and sure. 

“You cannot safely make terms with the 
evil of intemperance, any more than you can 
safely temporize with a lion in a jungle or 
a viper in the grass. There is no such thing 
as curing drunkenness by Tapering off/ or 
avoiding the thraldom of alcohol by indulg¬ 
ing in light intoxicants. The evil is alto¬ 
gether too insidious for any such a palliative. 
Oh! God, what mercilessly bitter experi¬ 
ences and desperately hopeless struggles 
have burned that fact into my life, as it has 
done into the lives and souls of so many, 
many millions of wretchedly deluded vie- 





272 


Bethesda 


tims. The reason why men crave liquor 
containing a very small quantity of alcohol 
is because of that alcohol little as it is. The 
only way to avoid the danger of such a 
craving is to make the prohibition essen¬ 
tially absolute. The people of this country 
are long suffering and ‘good sports.' They 
may treat the objections to absolute prohibi¬ 
tion with much patience. But ultimately 
they will say, with our Supreme Court:— 

‘While recognizing that there are limits 
beyond which Congress cannot go in treat¬ 
ing beverages as within the power of its en¬ 
forcement, we think those limits are not 
transcended by the provisions of the Vol¬ 
stead Act wherein liquors containing as 
much as one-half of one per cent, of alcohol 
by volume and fit for use for beverage pur¬ 
poses are treated as within that power.' 

“The plea of personal liberty and that of 
States' Rights will, of course, rise high 
against this reform; and the dirgelike re¬ 
frain that the whole thing is a failure and, 
especially in breeding contempt for law and 
causing more and more and more noxious 
things to be drunk, is causing far more harm 




Bethesda 


273 


than good. There may be some fair rea¬ 
soning in those arguments also. We Ameri¬ 
cans know well, however, that true liberty 
is the fullest realization of that which we 
believe and find to be for the highest good 
o'f all. We curtail our liberty no more by 
regulating the use of alcohol than we do by 
preventing the indiscriminate use of nar¬ 
cotics, or by controlling the methods of op¬ 
erating automobiles, or by prescribing 
numerous laws and rules relating to health. 
All of these things are done for the good of 
all of us, and they make ultimately for the 
fullest, broadest liberty and the general 
welfare. 

“The water of the world Bethesdic pool 
has been profoundly troubled. The United 
States of America have stepped into the 
water. The cure has come. All glory, laud 
and honor to Him who doeth all things well. 

“The cure has come. Yes, yes, for the 
young and unsullied lives, now here, and to 
arise in serried, glorious ranks of youth and 
beauty in the stately rolling centuries to 
come. But alcohol’s victims already within 
its relentless grasp must remain bound, and 




274 


Bethesda 


pinioned, and destroyed. Look with me be¬ 
yond those windows for a moment. The ten¬ 
der grass is nodding to the budding trees, 
and the murmur and song of the life of early 
spring are everywhere. We can mold that 
life. We can guard, protect, control and 
shape it and make it right and good. But 
the dead, knarled, rotting old oak out there 
in the yard is beyond our care and power. 
Its destiny is fixed. Its doom is irretriev¬ 
able. 

“Like that poor old oak are the thousands 
of wretched inebriates, hopeless drunkards, 
remediless victims—to one of whom you 
have so patiently listened this morning. The 
obligation was and is on me irresistibly to 
speak. Would to God that every unbesotted 
man, yes and woman too, in the world might 
hear. The words come from one who knows, 
0, so well, so bitterly, so hopelessly, of what 
he speaks. If you could feel or know one 
millionth part of the fiendish agony that 
the craving for alcohol has caused me, while 
I have stubbornly resisted its call in order 
to stand here and deliver this imperfect ad¬ 
dress, you would hesitate to criticize me be- 





Bethesda 


275 


cause of the next thing that I am going to 
do. The ordeal is past; the struggle is 
ended—as it has always ended; there is no 
escape for me from the bestial damnation 
caused by man’s most malignant foe, Al¬ 
cohol. For me it is too late. Behold—” 

He stood erect and motionless for a sec¬ 
ond. The expression of his sallow coun¬ 
tenance assumed the pathetic sternness of 
despair. The deep lines in his face, marks 
of titanic struggles and defeats, seemed to 
grow deeper. Into his naturally penetrating 
eyes came a fierce threatening look, as 
though something inhuman and fearsome 
were gazing through them. Those who be¬ 
held him sat rigid, awed and vaguely won¬ 
dering as they gazed. Dozens of men were 
sitting near enough to have seized him in an 
instant, but not a finger moved. 

Then, with his right hand, he reached 
under the desk behind which he stood, drew 
forth a large goblet filled to the brim with 
fine ‘Old Scotch’ and raised it rapidly to his 
lips. The action was so emphatic and un¬ 
expected that the large audience seemed to 
catch its breath, as if there would be a spon- 





276 


Bethesda 


taneous outcry of protest. But no sound 
escaped their lips; they sat spell-bound, 
staring at the sparkling liquor. 

Would he dare to drink? There would 
be no physical restraint, and no audible pro¬ 
test if he did so. No attempt was to be 
made by those ‘Followers of the Master* to 
snatch him from the abyss. 

But “the water was being troubled** even 
for his cure. A little white-robed lady who 
had been sitting by her father’s side near 
the middle of the auditorium arose to her 
full height, seized convulsively with one 
hand the back of the pew in front of her, 
and pointed at Calhoun with the index 
finger of the other hand. 

The face of Ruth Overton, as she thus 
stood in front of him for the first time since 
the German shell had wrecked their hospital, 
was livid with mingled fright and appre¬ 
hension ; but the same youthful buoyancy— 
almost childishness—which had always 
made her a beloved friend of all who knew 
her and all of God’s creatures, and the sweet, 
radiant reflex of her beautiful, dauntless 





“William Calhoun , stop!” 








Bethesda 


277 


soul were vividly depicted there; and with 
them was a loving but indomitable deter¬ 
mination—the sterling characteristic which 
had so naturally made her the ‘Little 
Leader’ in the wards of the war’s sick and 
wounded beyond the sea. 

In her sweet, soprano voice, clear and 
ringing to the remotest corner of the audi¬ 
torium, but without a tremor, she cried:— 
“WILLIAM CALHOUN, STOP!” 

The echo repeated to him from the choir 
loft— “stop!” 

Would he ignore those words, as he had 
always ignored them in the past? The 
tension was agonizing for those who looked 
and listened. 

Slowly the goblet, with its burden of un¬ 
tasted alcohol, descended to the pulpit desk. 
The hand that held and lowered it was 
trembling violently. There was an open 
window back of the pulpit; and the next in¬ 
stant the goblet and liquor were thrown 
through it into the yard beyond. It drench¬ 
ed the trunk of the dead, knarled oak, to 




278 


Bethesda 


which a few minutes before Calhoun had 
likened himself. 

The fierce, threatening look was gradual¬ 
ly leaving his care-worn, besotted face. It 
was being replaced by a glow of unwonted 
emotion, fed by the quenchless fire of love. 
He looked upward, with eyes now moist but 
glowing with a feeble hope and with a 
newly-kindled resolve. And, raising his 
right arm with a reverent gesture, he said 
very deliberately, in a low voice, but clear 
and firm enough to be heard by all:— 

‘Tor the third time those words have 
rung in my ears. Twice they have done so 
only to be unheeded and ignored, if not 
spurned. The first time they were uttered 
by the noblest physician in the world, my 
lifelong friend, on the bridge of the Rialto, 
just as my first attack of delirium tremens 
was about to reveal to me the real nature of 
the thraldom of alcohol's victims. The sec¬ 
ond time, the command came from officers 
and comrades alike when, in the Argonne, 
I was trying to terminate that thraldom 
here by rushing headlong into a stream of 




Bethesda 


279 


machine-gun missiles. 0! I pray that God 
will enable me to continue to yield complete 
obedience to this third one, this blessed one 
of those mandates— 

“And I now solemnly vow, before God and 
my fellow-men, that with His help, I will 
never touch the accursed stuff again.” 

Ruth Overton had fallen back into her 
seat, nervously exhausted. Her head was 
on her arms, and her entire body was shaken 
with convulsive sobs. But they were min¬ 
gled with a joyous exultation, as she heard 
his last words. 

The rest of the large audience were still 
sitting erect, in tense, anxious wonderment. 

Dr. Buffington, the Pastor, who had sat 
quietly back of Calhoun, was a student of 
psychology; and he was also endowed with 
a generous fund of tact. He realized that 
the best way to end the embarrassing situa¬ 
tion was, not to try to make any explana¬ 
tion or any comment at all, but to follow 
calmly the usual course of procedure. He 
arose accordingly, and said:—“Let us sing 
our closing hymn—number 651.” 




280 


Bethesda 


The audience rose, and sang— 

“Love divine, all love excelling,— 

Joy of heaven, to earth come down! 

Fix in us thy humble dwelling, 

All thy faithful mercies crown.” 

They were singing of Divine love. They 
could not sing of any other kind of love. 
There is only one brand. It is all Divine. 




CHAPTER XV 


FUTURITY 

“Man dies; but men live—live, at least, 
in that the budding and blooming life of 
every succeeding generation pulsates with 
their vitality. This is the irreducible 
minimum of the gloomiest answer to Job’s 
question, ‘If a man die, shall he live again?’ 
Yes, it says, he shall live; at the very least 
he shall live in the effects which his acts and 
words and thoughts shall continue to exert 
upon mankind. 

“The duty of all, and certainly the desire 
of the vast majority is to have those effects 
good, rather than bad. The very last mo¬ 
tive that should actuate us in endeavoring 
to make them good is selfishness. We will 
not, we dare not let our own interests or in¬ 
dulgences stand in the way of the vital prog¬ 
ress of the race. It is the next generation, 


281 



282 


Bethesda 


and the next after that, and the next, on 
and on ad infinitum , for whom we must do 
our best, and for whom we normally desire 
to do our best. We may be depended on, as 
a people, for that. It has been well said 
recently that, ‘while the American public 
very often may be careless, it is capable of 
wrath that demolishes and sweeps away 
when there is question of hurting its chil¬ 
dren.^ 

“It is a grand, good thing, a transcendent- 
ly splendid thing, that his love of our dear 
little hostess, here, could be a major force 
in snatching Billy Calhoun as a brand from 
the burning, and that similar influences are 
aiding potently in doing the same thing all 
over our country, for so many thousands of 
the young men of the present generation. 
It is a far greater blessing, a more superbly 
magnificent benediction, that the Eigh¬ 
teenth Amendment to our Constitution and 
the adequate statutes for its enforcement 
have made these present-day rescues possi¬ 
ble and enduring. But the crowning glory 
of all, the acme , the soul-satisfying gran¬ 
deur of result is in the ultimate making, 




Bethesda 


283 


through and by it all, of a better country for 
posterity to inhabit, a land becoming and 
sure to become, very gradually perhaps, 
probably with many adverse attacks and 
even apparent failures, but as certainly as 
the fact that that amendment was ratified 
with intense unanimity—sure to become a 
land free from the awful curse of intem¬ 
perance. 

“How can any father or mother oppose 
such an onward march of America for the 
benefit of their little ones? Would it be 
, yhysically possible for our good host, Billy, 
or his wife, Ruth, to look at their angelic 
boy, playing so innocently over there on the 
lawn, and then to put one minutest obstacle 
in the way of the great reform? Should 
it be any the less difficult for them to do so, 
if Billy had never felt the sting of the ser¬ 
pent ? How can a wife help or countenance 
the exposing of her young husband and 
those who may become dependent on him to 
a danger against which all the power of the 
Federal Government and that of most of the 
States are arrayed for its suppression? 
How can a husband see his wife and her pos- 




284 


Bethesda 


sible offspring exposed to such a danger, and 
yet fail to throw the last ounce of his in¬ 
fluence in favor of his country’s heroic and 
determined struggle against the hellish 
traffic in rum? How can anyone, who en¬ 
joys the blessings of American citizenship, 
see his country stripped and in the thick 
of the contest, determined to win against al¬ 
cohol's mightiest forces, and considering 
only what that winning—sure to be— 
means, for him and for countless genera¬ 
tions to come—yet find some excuse or pre¬ 
text for favoring the continuance of alcohol 
in some form as a beverage? 

‘Tar be it from me not to respect the 
opinion of those who can honestly take such 
a stand. Arguments based on the unwonted 
and to some extent unexpected evils which 
have sprung up in the wake of prohibition 
are certainly specious, if not cogent. Men, 
some of them of the highest standing, are 
crying ‘lo!’ here, and ‘behold!’ there; and 
are running and pointing in all directions. 
Yet three years have added to the force of 
that superbly forceful talk of William Cal¬ 
houn, when he told so eloquently of the 





Bethesda 


285 


troubling of the Bethesdic waters of our 
great world pool. 

“That war of wars was certainly the 
mightiest of all such troublings. Its 
existence is absolutely necessary to explain 
the Eighteenth Amendment. He would be 
a bold man—bold to rashness—who would 
dare to say that we would now have had 
that amendment if there had been no war. 
In the working out of events, the prepara¬ 
tion had been made, the way was paved, 
the stage was set, the hour had come; and 
the clock struck for the troubling of the 
waters when the first gun was fired on 
Belgian soil. Let those who doubt this try 
to explain the results in any other way; and 
then most, if not all of them will cease to 
doubt. 

“I started to say a very few words; but 
they are growing lengthy. It may all be 
summarized in three short sentences:— 
Prohibition came by an inevitable mighty 
force, whatever it may be called: I call it 
God. Prohibition is here to stay, as surely 
as was the Reformation or the abolition of 
slavery. Prohibition is splendid for the 




286 


Bethesda 


present; and it is transeendently grand and 
beneficent for all the coming generations, 
for whom it is our duty and our glory to 
aspire. 

“Would that I could go to every man and 
every woman in America, who hesitates at 
all, and say, somewhat in Billy's language 
of three years ago:— 

‘Men of America, listen! 

‘Women of America, listen!' 

In the light of the facts which I have just 
summarized it is your duty, it is your glori¬ 
ous privilege, it should be, it will be, your 
noblest ideal, to put all the force of your 
life, and character, and influence, into the 
struggle which your government —your 
own government —is splendidly and in the 
main successfully carrying on for the last¬ 
ing benefit of every man, woman and child 
in this favored land, and for the everlast¬ 
ing good of all its coming sons and daugh¬ 
ters to the end of time. Up and gird your¬ 
selves, and stand immovable for so magnifi¬ 
cent a cause." 

The speaker is Doctor Philip Ross. He is 
sitting, after dinner, at the table of William 






Bethesda 287 


Calhoun and his wife Ruth Calhoun (nee 
Overton). It is the second anniversary of 
the wedding of Ruth and Billy; and their 
friends are helping to make the occasion 
quietly but supremely happy. 

Word has just been received that New 
York’s Governor has signed the bill to repeal 
the Mullan-Gage Law; and the conversation 
has turned, of course, to the all-absorbing 
topic of the hour. 

As Doctor Ross pushes his chair back a 
little from the table and begins to speak in 
his deep earnest voice, it is evident that 
the years which have elapsed since we 
first met him—on that festive evening in 
Venice—have been arduous but profitable 
for him. There is more silver in the hair, 
and the features are less rotund; but in the 
large, gray eyes, always clear and bright, 
are more of stern, dauntless resolve and de¬ 
termination; and the face, slightly more 
wrinkled, glows with an even steadier 
and more lofty purpose, though with also 
an added joy and benignity. Four strenu¬ 
ous years spent in saving lives and alleviat¬ 
ing suffering on the firing line made him 






288 


Bethesda 


a more skilful physician and surgeon, a 
kindlier friend and even a better man. 

Across the table from him sits his wife 
Marie Ross (nee Boze’) the host’s pretty 
French, black-eyed nurse. She was absent 
from the hospital on that afternoon in 1918 
when the German shell wrought such havoc; 
for, in preparing to accompany the Doctor 
to New York, she was spending the day in 
the busy shops of Paris. On her left sits 
Judge Overton, a little older perhaps to look 
at, but more jolly, and very well pleased just 
now to have her on one side of him and Mrs. 
Hugh Oliver on the other. 

It was gratifying to Mrs. Calhoun to 
see Hugh, who is now sitting by her side, 
turn for life’s happiness to the beautiful, 
young widow of his brother Gilbert, whose 
sad departure swelled the endless ranks of 
alcohol’s victims. 

When sweet Mrs. Overton, benignant Doc¬ 
tor Buffington, his good wife, Billy’s father 
and mother, and General and Mrs. Oliver 
are also mentioned, the little group of 
happy, genial friends around the table is 
made complete. 




Bethesda 


289 


But for prohibition this blessed gather¬ 
ing could never have been. Who can under¬ 
take to count the thousands of happy com¬ 
panies and homes over the length and 
breadth of our favored country today of 
which the same thing may be truly said; or 
who can candidly endeavor to measure up 
against the resulting good the cases—quite 
numerous if you please—of excessive de¬ 
bauchery, or the inordinate use of narcotics 
or noxious drinks that have caused many 
evils to follow in the path of the great re¬ 
form? 

The scene of the home gathering is ex¬ 
quisitely beautiful. The last days of May 
have brought with them the natural, genial 
warmth of the springtime. The afternoon 
sun, just dipping to the horizon, is pro¬ 
fusely spreading his golden-red rays over 
the sparkling surface of the Hudson; and 
the shadow of the Palisades is framing its 
side with hues ranging from black to 
mauve. In the west, rising in serried 
columns and vying with one another in 
matchless brilliancy, appear the mul¬ 
tiple colorings of one of those superb sun- 




290 


Betliesda 


sets that occasionally visit the valley of 
the noble river. As far as the eye can reach, 
north, east and south, well kept lawns dis¬ 
play their brilliant verdure; and touches of 
white apple blossoms, pink peach blossoms 
and the varying hues of magnolia trees and 
many early flowers impart a restful charm 
to the rolling, fertile fields. In the air is the 
soft, droning, low music of insect life; the 
twitter or song of birds now and then add¬ 
ing a distincter note to the scarcely audible 
melody. One may travel far and long and 
search diligently without being able to find 
more exquisite settings for perfect homes 
than are many such places within and near 
the environs of the natural gateway to 
America, the greatest city in the world. 

The modest home of Billy and Ruth, lo¬ 
cated amid such natural beauty, has over¬ 
flowed today; and the table is set and din¬ 
ner has been served under a wide-spreading 
elm out on the lawn overlooking the river. 
Right over there, about a hundred feet 
away, is the baby-boy, William Overton Cal¬ 
houn, with his golden-yellow curls waving 
in the soft breeze, rolling and tumbling on 







Bethesda 


291 


the grass and playing “tag” with his nurse. 
As the sterner years advance he is going 
to look more and more as his father now 
looks. The care and despondency have 
departed from the countenance of William 
Calhoun, and in their place shines the light 
of joyous confidence and abiding peace. 

“Doctor Ross,” says Judge Overton, 
glancing at the happy child at play, “your 
words prompt me, in imagination, to group 
around that splendid lad, with the light of 
heaven in his eyes, the thousands, nay the 
millions like him over this far-flung country 
of ours, and to repeat with the utmost 
emphasis, your last question—how can any 
one, who calls himself an American, find 
any excuse or pretext for favoring the con¬ 
tinuance of alcohol in any form as a bev¬ 
erage ? 

“Do they argue that the percentage of 
alcohol which they seek is so small that it 
cannot do any harm? If it has any effect 
as alcohol, it can and will do harm; and if 
it has no such effect, why do they want it? 

“There is no reasonable argument, even 
though it comes from the pen of New York’s 




292 


Betliesda 


popular Governor, in merely asserting, or 
even proving, that one-half of one per cent, 
of alcohol does not make a beverage intoxi¬ 
cating. Neither is there any ‘hypocrisy' in 
fixing that amount as the limit. Alcohol is 
alcohol , with some of its effects, wherever 
and however found. The people of America, 
who want the Eighteenth Amendment en¬ 
forced fully and beyond question, have the 
right to a rule as to percentages which shall 
certainly avoid its baneful effects—which 
shall surely exclude the possibility that a 
beverage may in any degree tend to foster 
a craving for alcohol. 

“Are we told that too many evils have 
arisen as the result of prohibition—all kinds 
of harmful stuffs are drunk and used in 
ways hardly thought of before; men who 
still do get drunk become more harmfully 
besotted than they did when they could ob¬ 
tain alcohol freely; the use of substitutes, 
especially when too much sugar is thus 
taken, is fostering diseases and threatening 
our vitality? Let him who reasons thus 
not only consider the difficulties that fol¬ 
lowed our abolition of slavery and the plac- 




Bethesda 


293 


ing of the ballot in the hands of the negro, 
but especially let him count the actual, 
proved instances of such evils and compare 
them with the ravages of alcohol before we 
had prohibition. The former will be found 
to be almost infinitesimal when compared 
with the latter, and also approaching 
the vanishing point as the succeeding years 
multiply—as they surely will do—the bless¬ 
ings of the temperate life. The evils inci¬ 
dent to prohibition loom too large for him 
who will let them do so. He is like those 
who conclude, very erroneously to be sure, 
from sensational accounts of divorce suits, 
that marriage is a failure. He resembles 
the many persons who think, because they 
occasionally read of a successful will con¬ 
test, that most men die without valid tes¬ 
tamentary dispositions of their property. 
Tens of thousands of wills are pro¬ 
bated to one that is overthrown. A hun¬ 
dred thousand homes remain happy to 
one that is wrecked by divorce. The great¬ 
est liar on earth speaks the truth a hundred 
times to his utterance of one falsehood. As 
against one man who becomes a more hope- 




294 


Bethesda 


less drunkard or destroys himself by the 
use of narcotics, drugs, or sugar, as a result 
of prohibition, a million of our youths are 
by the same cause saved from the frightful 
ravages and results of intemperance; and 
the proportion in favor of the latter will 
grow and multiply as the years advance. 

“Is it said that the enforcement of the 
Eighteenth Amendment has been thus far 
a failure; and is it feared that we can never 
make it beneficially effective? A careful 
study of statistics shows that it is splendidly 
beneficial today, and has been so from its 
inception. And who is he who questions the 
ability of the United States of America 
ultimately to enforce fully a constitutional 
provision adopted by the people with such 
wonderful unanimity? It may require 
twenty years or more, as our President has 
conservatively said. A few of the States 
may balk in the process, as they are already 
showing marked signs of doing. Many 
difficulties may arise, some of them al¬ 
ready insistent, with respect to the 
high seas, and our foreign relations, as 
affected by our mode of enforcing the 




Bethesda 


295 


Amendment. But as sure as the continu¬ 
ance of this Government will be its ultimate 
overthrow of all such obstacles. 

“The action of New York, in repealing its 
enforcement act, the Mullan-Gage Law, is 
a great temporary misfortune for the 
country, and especially for this State. If 
its amiable Governor wished to test out the 
rights of his State against the Federal Gov¬ 
ernment, he should have waited for more 
opportune time and occasion. He did not 
receive his great popular vote as a man¬ 
date to put obstacles in the way of absolute 
prohibition of alcohol as a beverage. Ulti¬ 
mately the people will say to him:—‘Al, Al, 
it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. 
Thy opposition and all others must and will 
be removed. The will of the 'people of Amer¬ 
ica will be obeyed by the people of America.” 

“One thing more is to be noted,” says 
practical Colonel Oliver. “America is neces¬ 
sarily leading off in a world-wide reform. 
It will not be long, certainly not many gen¬ 
erations, before the superior efficiency of 
our people, not only of those who labor with 
hand or brain but of every class and condi- 






296 


Bethesda 


tion, will be so thoroughly recognized, and 
the cause—the temperate life—so well 
understood, that the other nations and 
peoples will hasten to follow our example. 
In this aspect of our Eighteenth Amend¬ 
ment and the statutes for its enforcement, 
we may put aside all moral considerations, 
if we prefer. Economic and social forces 
alone will drive all men who think to the 
temperate life, the splendid results of 
which will be clearly apparent throughout 
our beloved country/’ 

“May I add just a word,” exclaims Mrs. 
Hugh Oliver, “in behalf of the countless 
women and children who have suffered in 
the past because of the want of an Eigh¬ 
teenth Amendment. Let any true Ameri¬ 
can, I care not who or what he or she may 
be otherwise, watch, as I have had to do, the 
decline of a loved one from the noblest 
position of God’s noblest creatures, down, 
down, down, the frightful path of alcoholic 
debauchery until the hand that raises the 
accursed cup dashes the life to the bottom 
of the deepest pit; and then let him try, if 
he dare, to advocate the retention of any 





Bethesda 


297 


material percentage of alcohol in liquor that 
is to be used as a beverage, or to whine 
about difficulties in the enforcement of so 
glorious a reform.” 

“I say Dotty, old friend,” murmurs Hugh 
Oliver to the hostess, as he glances affec¬ 
tionately at his wife, “I think I shall have to 
be the * echo 9 of that sentiment. Let me add 
that I am so glad you did not become an 
Ariadne, but waited a year after Bacchus 
had forsaken Billy before you accepted 
him.” 

“Please to understand,” she responds 
smiling, “that he deserves more credit for 
that happy result than do I. I do not believe 
he would have married me within that year, 
even if I had asked him to do so. What 
might have happened, if he had been insist¬ 
ent, is merely one of those matters that you 
gentlemen are pleased to call ‘academic’ 

“We have heard somewhere and some¬ 
how,” remarks Dr. Buffington, “of a duet, 
that was beautifully sung a few years ago, 
on the Venetian Lagoon —'0 Sole Mio. The 
same artists can doubtless sing it just as 





298 


Betliesda 


well now. May I suggest, and request, that 
they favor us.” 

“Oh! yes, yes,” comes the call. “A song 
by Dotty and Billy.” 

“With all our hearts,” exclaims the host. 
“But I think you would prefer a few stanzas 
that my little wife has written recently. 
She does not write poetry, as a rule. She 
expresses it, rather, in her life. But she 
just could not help putting these words 
down on paper and showing them to me.” 

Ruth Calhoun walks around the table to 
her husband's side and takes his arm with 
an affectionate little embrace. They stand 
looking across the lawn at their baby-boy, 
all about whom, for them at least, is the 
halo of heaven's presence; and they sing 
(to the tune “Serenity”)—and methinks the 
recording Angels of God make memoranda 
of the song:— 




Bethesda 


299 


“Angelic forms we may not see, 

About Bethesda’s brink; 

We may insist that only we 

Have power to plan or think: 

While in our puny strength and pride, 

We search the deeps and find, 

That endless wonders are outside 
The measure of man’s mind. 

But history tells a story ripe, 

No logic can gainsay; 

‘Bethesda is a perfect type, 

True progress comes that way.’ 

So came to us our temperate life; 

We can not let it go: 

Exemption from the stress and strife, 

Our little ones must know. 

And when our thoughts rise from the sod, 
We view earth’s pool aright; 

And know its troublings are from God; 
The cure is by HIS might.” 


The End 










t 









































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































